Purists will surely find something to cavil at in Aneil Karia’s latest spin on William Shakespeare’s greatest and longest play, Hamlet, as is so often the case in most movie adaptations. But bent as they are on detailing why this version sucks as its predecessors did, it is undeniable that this new work, starring Riz Ahmed in the titular role, is of a piece with Shakespeare’s original vision while daringly moving past it. For a material so deeply ingrained in our memory, the excitement always lies in the very act of transformation, which is indicative of Hamlet’s staying power and infinite malleability.
Here Hamlet is reimagined as the troubled scion of a wealthy South Asian family running a real estate empire in contemporary London. The real estate company is called Elsinore, a name present at every turn, from empty warehouses to newspaper headlines, a name with a vicious reputation for gentrifying small urban neighborhoods and driving tenants out of their homes, including Fortinbras, the invading Norwegian prince in the actual play now depicted as the leader of the city’s displaced dwellers and therefore a figure of resistance. If there is a real downside to the film, it is that Karia does not explore this layer a little bit further, given it seems decidedly significant to the capitalist rot at the heart of the modified Shakespearean tragedy.
In the opening canto, the viewer learns about the demise of the company’s CEO, who happens to be Hamlet’s father. When the eponymous Dane returns for the funeral, he is appalled to discover his newly widowed mother Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha) and his uncle Claudius (Art Malik) are about to marry at a horribly fast speed, which instantly sends him spiraling. One night, after going out on a bender, he sees the spirit of his father in an alley, follows him to an abandoned construction site, and learns of his murder at the hands of Claudius in order to take over the clan’s empire, as well as his wish for revenge. Hamlet contemplates the spectral figure and his own sanity. Is he simply hallucinating his father? Is it an apparition or a work of the devil? If Ahmed is doing the baiting in his new Bond-themed comedy series Bait, here he’s the one being baited.
Karia, who previously worked with Ahmed in the Oscar-winning short The Long Goodbye, takes pleasure in isolating his melancholy protagonist in a Horatio-less world where he is practically forced to confront all the grief, madness, and disillusionment all by himself. Cinematographer Stuart Bentley readily obliges as the camera follows Hamlet on foot, always managing to make him detached from the often crowded spaces he enters, evoking a presence that is somehow both embodied and disembodied. The score in constant distress, courtesy of Maxwell Sterling, makes this shifting psychology even more haunting. Whereas Horatio (alongside Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and beyond) is physically excised in this version, Karia, sharing writing credits with Michael Lesslie, redistributes the wealth of Shakespeare’s text, specifically the lines intended for the loyal confidant, to other characters, including Morfydd Clark’s Ophelia, Hamlet’s submissive paramour soon driven to madness, and Joe Alwyn’s equally vengeful Laertes. (Curiously, Alwyn here plays another sibling, though far more controlling than protective, as he did in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet.)
And what better way to propel this stunningly revamped Hamlet than with Ahmed, who has the rare gift of suffering so beautifully and whose tense visage and inward sensibility here hew closely to his career-best performance in Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal. His Hamlet stalls and self-destructs, his psyche growing increasingly damaged as he moves from room to room and maneuvers a scheme to expose his father’s brutal murder and betrayal and implicate his rapacious uncle. Ahmed seems deeply along for the ride, and the actor’s most somber moment is also the film’s most inventive bit, reciting Shakespeare’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy while driving at breakneck speed, at one point releasing his grip on the wheel as though ready to embrace a fatal collision, caving in to his darkest thoughts. In this state of aching vulnerability, Hamlet holds up a mirror to us, just as the world does to him. It’s never easy to imagine and reimagine a material this hauntingly prescient and restlessly relevant. What a great relief it is, then, that Karia and Ahmed have confidently pumped new life into this familiar tragedy.
DIRECTOR: Aneil Karia; CAST: Riz Ahmed, Morfydd Clark, Joe Alwyn, Timothy Spall, Art Malik; DISTRIBUTOR: Vertical; IN THEATERS: April 10; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 53 min.
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