'Hamlet' Review: This Visceral New Take on The Bard Proves Its Reason 'To Be'
director aneil karia readapts shakespeare’s masterpiece with a distinctly digital and urban visual landscape.
The cultural impact of William Shakespeare’s work, Hamlet in particular, is practically universal. The titular character has often been described as the dream role for budding and veteran thespians alike, with the play always being performed on stage somewhere, and with numerous film and television adaptations, the latest of which comes from Oscar-winning director Aneil Karia (The Long Goodbye) and actor Riz Ahmed (Sound Of Metal).
This new adaptation of Hamlet swaps Middle Ages Denmark for the underbelly of modern day London, and reimagines the royals as land developers. All settings in the film are refit to the contemporary setting, with little dramatic impact lost in translation. While such a choice may remove the regal novelty from a design standpoint, the film is visually striking at every turn. Karia’s sophomore feature feels visually pronounced, with a myriad of new ideas on how to shoot the age-old play in such a viscerally immersive manner. At the same time, the creative choice was made to keep most of the play’s dialogue intact. While there are occasional embellishments to keep things a bit modern, and integration of a few Urdu phrases to match the new Pakistani royal family, an overwhelming majority of the film is played with near-exact Shakespearian dialogue. This is not necessarily a new thing for modern Bard adaptations, with Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet using the same strategy, although with a sense of camp and heightened flair. This being said, there’s easily a world in which Karia and Ahmed’s Hamlet can come off as a campy reindition based on dialogue, with dramatic effect lost in translation, but this isn’t the case at all. The classical dialogue and contemporary stakes do not butt tonal heads, and feel as if they’re acutely synthesized, a claim that can be made for much of the film.
A specific portion of the film’s second act serves as such a brilliant example of the film’s synthesizing approach. While ripe with the expected Shakespearian drama and moodiness, it incorporates its own unique spin on ‘the play within the play’ that is a key moment in the source material, in which Hamlet instructs a group of actors to perform a modified version of The Mousetrap in order to illicit a indicting reaction from his corrupted uncle Claudius. Karia’s version reimagines this as the big mid-point of the film, staging an elaborate set-piece featuring a troupe of South Asian dancers acting out a dazzlingly-choreographed saga of death and revenge during Claudius (Art Malik) and Gertrude’s (Sheeba Chaddha) wedding. This vibrant new cultural element isn’t the only welcome addition to this portion of the play. Editors
Mikkel E.G. Nielsen and Amanda James deftly cut between the dance performance and a series of heightened reaction shots from all members of the ensemble, alongside a pulsing Hindi ballad with added EDM elements. On top of everything in this sequence, Riz Ahmed gets to play Hamlet in such a way we’ve not quite seen on screen, setting aside the angst and channeling a catty, cunning, and frankly unhinged version of the character that I can only liken to the Rupert Pupkin character from The King Of Comedy. If this portion of the film won’t win over even the most puritan of Bard fanatics, even for a few minutes, I don’t know what will. This sequence is nothing short of enthralling, with striking new imagery added to an expertly dramatic impetus. In many ways, it is a perfect encapsulation of all the film’s strengths, and the ostensible peak of the film.
Where this Hamlet adaptation begins to wane is during its third act, where it starts to feel as if the core creative synthesis struggles to find new ground with the angst-ridden climax. The film, like the play, introduces the character of Fortinbras in the third act, traditionally a foil to Hamlet, who is not a prominent character in the play by any means, and because the film introduces a very clever new twist on the idea of Fortinbras, it suffers for not having more of them. In any case, bloodshed is an unavoidable part of any Hamlet climax, and the film’s execution of the dramatic finale doesn’t quite reach the visual nor visceral highs of previous moments of the film, despite some great moments from a generally underused, but nonetheless stellar Art Malik as Claudius. On the topic of underused characters, the tragic role of Ophelia, and her sudden death, have long been lamented by critics and scholars alike in analyses of Hamlet. Karia’s film adaptation doesn’t necessarily give Morfydd Clark’s Ophelia more agency or new scenes compared to the play, but the staging of her scenes and contemporary change in relationship to Hamlet is refreshing, with a inspired turn from Clark, it still feels as if the film needed just a bit more from her to achieve the intended dramatic affect of her sudden end.
While it may not rise into the proverbial Mount Rushmore of Shakespeare adaptations, Aneil Karia and Riz Ahmed’s contemporary adaptation of Hamlet proves to be a worthwhile exercise in dramaturgy and filmmaking in equal measure. The new viscerally cannot be undersold, and the new creative approaches make for some genuinely great imagery that brings out all the best of the storied play, and the infusion of South Asian culture makes a case for more contemporary and culturally specific Shakespeare adaptations. Future generations of high-school students will be in for a treat, should this adapation make its way into the perennial Hamlet curriculums.