Shakespeare film adaptations tend to go big. Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet recast its star-crossed teenage lovers as the children of warring corporate empires in Verona Beach. Ethan Hawke’s Y2K Hamlet follows a young filmmaker in New York City trying to keep his production company Denmark Corporation afloat. A whole genre of teen movies — 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s the Man — transposes the Bard’s comedies to American high schools. At their best, these are high-concept, high-cool retellings. At worst, they buckle under the weight of the classics they’re adapting.
Aneil Karia’s Hamlet, out Friday in select theaters, has a glitzy concept. The tragedy is brought to modern-day London, centering Riz Ahmed’s Hamlet as the son of a wealthy South Asian family who runs the real estate corporation Elsinore. The company is in the hands of Hamlet’s uncle Claudius (Art Malik) and mother Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha), who marry after Hamlet’s father’s death. It’s a fitting framework for a pop-culture moment abuzz with both Shakespeare and opulence in the wake of Hamnet and Succession. But this Hamlet refuses to rest on the play’s laurels, or its scenery, offering a truly new perspective in how its time-honored story is retold.
Instead of going for spectacle, pivotal early scenes in Hamlet take place in quiet spaces: bedrooms, alleyways, living rooms. The film skips the ghost sighting that opens the play, instead landing on Hamlet in a morgue, needing help from Claudius to perform funeral rites for his father. When he first finds Morfydd Clark’s Ophelia, Hamlet is desperate for a breather from his father’s wake, and she’s leaning out of an upstairs window to smoke, smiling at him. As Laertes (Hamnet’s Joe Alwyn, in another protective Elizabethan brother turn) warns Ophelia to stay away from Hamlet because he won’t marry her, he’s right in front of them — Ahmed sits uncomfortably on the bed before being pulled away from her, his eyes heavy with longing and embarrassment. The intimacy makes the story’s later betrayals cut all the deeper.
The Shakespeare biopic starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal opens this week at the Belcourt and AMC Thoroughbred 20
When they work, changes to the script like this provide fascinating commentary on the play and the adaptation’s cultural context, showing a deep love for both. There are clever choices throughout: The dialogue is mostly original early modern English, but the king’s ghost (Avijit Dutt) speaks to Hamlet in Hindi. The play Hamlet orders to reveal Claudius’ murder plot at his wedding to Gertrude is translated to a phantasmagoric classical dance sequence with driving, unmooring sound design.
That said, some of Hamlet’s abridging choices are confusing misses. The second half pushes through pacing issues, cramming acts III, IV and V of the play into a single night: Hamlet is “sent to Delhi” to be killed after killing Polonius (Timothy Spall) in a grisly sequence, but then he comes home, eloquently apologizing for the crazed murder he committed hours prior. Horatio, who provides a foil for Hamlet and a grounding force in the play, is missing. We also never get to see Ophelia’s legendary downward spiral — instead, the camera finds her already drowned. Casting Clark as Shakespeare’s archetypal mad waif but not letting her go fully Saint Maude with the role would be a disappointment in any Hamlet adaptation, but it’s especially a shame in this one, where she shines so brightly in her scenes with Ahmed.
Despite its slight unevenness, Hamlet is a beguiling watch — a rare adaptation that doesn’t try to convince us of Shakespeare’s merit, or rely on that merit to keep it afloat. Instead, it lets the old words breathe anew.
