Hamlet

Most film versions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet come from an essentially stagey place, and are almost invariably made by theatre people (the ultimate example being Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour 1996 version).

But in the play’s latest screen outing, star Riz Ahmed and director Aneil Karia – neither of whom have any background in theatre – have essentially made a film about grief and depression that uses Shakespeare’s words and story in a way that is cinematic first and foremost. 

I could bore on about how screenwriter Michael Lesslie has done stuff like cut out Horatio, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and the entire Yorick bit. But discussing this version as if it was just a stage take with some novel ideas is to miss the point of how wholly Shakespeare has been swallowed by the cinema here – even if in the end there are a couple of plot beats it struggles to surmount.

It’s a story about a traumatised man from a wealthy British Indian family, stumbling in a daze through suburban London after the death of his father. Cinematographer Stuart Bentley’s shaky camera cinematography is lush and neon streaked as it soaks up blingy nightclubs, a lavish Hindu wedding and a bathetic funeral, and lots and lots of outer London at night. There’s never a sense that the need to cram in Shakespeare’s words ever gets in the way of the business of cinema. And while the iambic pentameter isn’t exactly deployed sparingly, it feels like the pruned text is used with great purpose: the fact these very modern characters talk in such rarified language feels suggestive of the emotional state they find themselves in. 

Ahmed is agonisingly intense as a Hamlet who is a mess from the beginning. When he says ‘I have of late lost all my mirth’, he seems to be discussing a malaise that stretches back way beyond the events of the film. The meeting with his father’s ghost after a ket binge, the revelation that his uncle Claudius (Art Malik) is to marry his mother Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha) – these things deepen his spiral, but they don’t start it. With the play there is always discussion of whether Hamlet is ‘really’ mad or just feigning it to investigate his father”s death. But here there seems to be little question that he’s deeply depressed from the off.

It’s powerful, beautifully shot and burningly emotional

It’s powerful, beautifully shot and burningly emotional. It’s a bit lacking in vibrancy: an underrated fact about Hamlet is that it’s quite amusing, but that’s mostly dispensed with here, and Timothy Spall’s menacing, enforcer-ish Polonius struggles to really make an impression with all his funny lines cut. 

In the end, it can’t quite break away from Shakespeare’s intent. For all the screenplay’s deft repurposing, it can’t really avoid the fact that it’s an odd tonal shift when people start dying. You can do a modern dress stage version of Hamlet that ends in a Jacobean-style bloodbath because there’s a duality of intent that exists in a theatre: it’s still the original play, but it’s been interpreted. This isn’t the case here. 

And there are still some bits that feel like an ungainly attempt to transpose Elizabethan geopolitics into the present: there’s a whole thing going on with the character of Fortinbras – here the collective name for the inhabitants of a tent city rather than just, you know, a guy – that really doesn’t make much sense and probably didn’t need to be included.

At the end of the day, it’s not really Hamlet, it’s something new that uses the words from Hamlet. But at its best, it’ll still hit you with all the force of Shakespeare's existential masterpiece.

In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Feb 6.