Screenwriter Michael Lesslie and director Aneil Karia have devised a stark and severe new interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet; there are transpositions and cuts, some light modernisations, and the text is stripped down a good deal. It’s an austerely challenging reading and incidentally, right about now, nothing could be further from the richly empathetic and redemptive approach of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, about the play’s imagined origins.
The setting is modern London’s world of shady family business and family dysfunction, wedding parties, blandly scheming associates and SUVs speeding through the night-time streets. Hamlet looks here like no one as much as Kendall Roy from TV’s Succession. Riz Ahmed plays the prince, horrified by a ghostly vision of his dead father (Avijit Dutt) who, in a chilling scene, summons him to a bleak urban rooftop to announce he was murdered by his brother Claudius (Art Malik). Claudius now is a hard-faced property speculator who has evicted a tented community of people led by Fortinbras from some prime real estate, and who now intends to marry Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha).
Hamlet retreats into shocked, enraged indecision and a kind of confrontational madness intended to embarrass the wrongdoers while exempting him from actual punitive action; it creates a growing miasma of authentic tension. Timothy Spall is the ingratiating, menacing Polonius, whose murder is brutally explicit and violent, and deliberate in a way it isn’t in the original. Morfydd Clark is Polonius’s daughter Ophelia, now deeply hurt at her former suitor Hamlet’s sudden and fanatical coldness to her, and Joe Alwyn is her brother Laertes.
Ahmed carries the production with his performance of someone convulsed with weakness and self-hate. This film loses most of the soliloquies (including “Alas, poor Yorick” and the skull), which traditionally get the audience on Hamlet’s side, though “To be, or not to be” stays; Hamlet virtually screams it at the wheel of his car. Ophelia’s importance to Hamlet is fractionally increased by rerouting some of Hamlet’s dialogue with Horatio to her, although we lose Ophelia’s mad scene, which is a misjudgment, I think.
Overall, this is an intelligent and focused account and one which, at least at first, allows you to ask the question: what if Claudius, however unscrupulous and predatory, is in fact innocent of murder? What if the ghost and his accusation is Hamlet’s hallucinatory delusion, a psychosexual projection of his own disgust? There’s a rigorous chill to this Hamlet.
