Hamlet

Riz Ahmed stars as the titular Shakespearean hero, only transported from Denmark to modern-day London. With his wealthy industrialist father dead, fortune in jeopardy, and his mother marrying and conspiring with a sly uncle, the brash, immature young scion must (as Ahmed describes) “grieve the illusion that the world is a fair place”.

Yet another Hamlet adaptation (sort of). The Bard isn’t new to adaptations and reworkings across timelines, languages, and cultures. So, it doesn’t surprise anyone (English major or not) when Shakespeare’s ghostly tragedy Hamlet gets a makeover every now and then. And yet the all-too-familiar story of the Danish prince Hamlet avenging his father’s death can transcend its rage and confusion in fresher packages. Only recently did we get Chloe Zhao’s tearjerker Hamnet, which traces the origins of Shakespeare’s play from the dark depths of Shakespeare’s wife grieving the loss of their pre-teen son. As for this new Riz Ahmed-fronted adaptation by director Aneil Karia, it seeks to cement the ill-fated prince in a changing, multicultural London. But then again, Hamlet’s universality is such that we already had a brilliant South Asian take back in 2014 with Vishal Bhardwaj’s Indian drama Haider, which recreates war-torn Denmark in the militarized state of Kashmir. In the face of artistically supreme and emotionally charged Shakespeare remixes like Haider or Hamnet, Aneil Karia’s Hamlet might seem like yet another excuse for an actor to subject a skull to the immortal words “to be or not to be”. And yet despite its unimaginative title, the newly released Hamlet is an admirable experiment.

Shakespeare’s original lines are retained for a hyper-sensory visual experience in a nocturnal London. Despite its modern setting, the film sticks close to the Shakespearean dialogue from the source material. While this “old soul in a new body” approach might initially seem hard or too eccentric to follow, the frantic camerawork and some occasional segues in Urdu and Hindi keep the ground running. Despite its London setting, Kaia finds solace in tighter location shots than any of the overused wide landscapes of Westminster. From neon green street signs lighting a haunted Ahmed’s face in the dark to a vibrantly kinetic Bollywood-inspired musical sequence, Karia’s visual language boasts enough richness to draw in even the staunchest of literature purists.

The love for the original play is obvious, but it also limits reinvention. While retaining most of the Elizabethan lingo, there’s little scope for more timely themes to be explored. Relying on more local London dialects or fleshing out more of that Urdu/Hindi dialogue would have explained deeper family rifts in South Asian families, or diving deeper into Hamlet’s quest for identity as an entitled brat but also a brown man in a post-Brexit island. There’s a chance that Ahmed didn’t wish to perform an encore of his socio-political raps from his album The Long Goodbye (with Karia directing an accompanying Oscar-winning short that depicts a far-right attack on a brown British family). But in restaging Shakespeare in his original form, Karia occasionally struggles to address newer subplots like an underground skater club that’s staging its own anti-rich rebellion. It’s almost like the film aims to break barriers but also play it safe. Hence, even the presence of British thespians like Art Malik (as Hamlet’s uncle) and Timothy Spall (as an enforcer of said uncle) doesn’t add much weight when they’re just reduced to textbook caricatures.

This new Hamlet might alienate audiences, but Riz Ahmed is fired up on all engines in a performance that might hype up Shakespeare himself. The best thing to come out of Karia’s Hamlet is the pre-release press run with Ahmed heartwarmingly recalling how reading the play offered him solace in the midst of divided times, how he finds Hamlet to be universally relatable for anyone seeking resistance, and how this tragic hero is “grieving the illusion that the world is a fair place”. While Hamlet is still rooted in personal tragedies and vendettas as is canon, Ahmed’s intensely steel-eyed performance makes up for the film’s social and moral vagueness. As the British heartthrob has proven time and again with understated performances in human dramas, Sound of Metal and Mogul Mowgli, Ahmed lets his eyes do the talking in moments of betrayal and deceit. But when the chaos only unravels further, Ahmed also sheds his coyness and breaks into some hyperactive monologues, boldly reclaiming the young prince’s impulsiveness. And with a hastily paced, shakily filmed moment in a moving car, Ahmed delivers the most Nicolas Cage-coded, off-the-wall reprise of “to be or not to be”. The skull is switched with a steering wheel, and the static stage evolves into an over-speeding joyride through the streets of London. With Ahmed effortlessly switching gears from mournful grief to hopeless anger to a twisted sense of self-awareness and freedom, it’s truly one of the film’s high points, making a case for Ahmed and Keira to take an age-old text and breathe new life into it.