Riz Ahmed in Bold but Shaky Adaptation

This latest version of Hamlet begins with a death ritual. Riz Ahmed, as the title character, washes his father’s body, surrounded by his uncle, Claudius, and other men as a Hindu priest recites from the Bhagavad Gita. That scene instantly and viscerally grounds you in the title character’s overpowering grief. It’s an inspired addition to Shakespeare’s play, and proof of how illuminating it can be to tweak one of the world’s masterpieces.

Unfortunately, Aneil Karia’s film gets rockier from there. Setting the story in a South Asian community in London works beautifully. Here the play-within-a play that acts out Claudius’ murder of Hamlet’s father is a dance by a South Asian troupe, an eloquent touch. It’s the details of transporting the play to the present day and trying to make it cinematic that are often jarring and clumsy. One of the cringey choices is making the Hamlet family business the Elsinore Construction Group, a poke-in-the-ribs reference to the castle in Shakespeare. And “To be or not to be” has a heavy-handed setting.

Ahmed has always been great at projecting quiet intensity, and he brings that quality to Hamlet, but not at first. In his early scenes his delivery is whispery, and he looks confounded at the news that so soon after his father’s death, his mother, Gertrude, will marry Claudius.

It later becomes clear that the performance is meant to build. Hamlet becomes more enraged when his father’s ghost appears and reveals that Claudius murdered him, setting Hamlet on his path of revenge. Later, at Gertrude and Claudius’ wedding reception, he explodes in fury. But this deliberately slow build and Ahmed’s subdued beginning make the character and the film less gripping than they should be from the start. Ahmed delivers Shakespeare’s language fluidly. He is a perfectly fine Hamlet in a very long line of perfectly fine Hamlets.

The main character is even more of a focus here than usual, which is not a problem in itself, but as a result most of the other players barely register. The exceptions are Art Malik, who makes Claudius’ duplicity believable, and Sheeba Chadha, who is wrenching when Gertrude becomes remorseful. The others almost fade away in their small roles. Timothy Spall glowers as Polonius, the fixer and advisor to the family business. This Polonius does not dispense any sage advice. Joe Alwyn mostly disappears into the background as Hamlet’s friend, Laertes. And Ophelia’s role is greatly diminished. Morfydd Clark, pallid at first, has some emotive scenes at the wedding when Ophelia rails at Hamlet for turning away from her. The character is next seen in a body bag.

Karia’s attempts to make the play cinematic work well at times. The ghost of Hamlet’s father appears at night on the roof of a high-rise building, the lights of London in the background. It’s a suitably eerie image. Throughout, the cinematography has a crispness and clarity that add a bracing feel to the story.

But at other times the cinematic ploys overwhelm everything else. When Laertes takes Hamlet to a noisy, drug-filled club to help him get over his grief, the scene just seems to be trying hard to liven things up. An even less successful choice is the decision to have Hamlet deliver “To be or not to be” while driving a car at a dangerously high speed, taking his hands off the wheel as a truck approaches head-on. In addition to being a too-literal visualization of Hamlet asking himself if he should go on living, the action overpowers the monologue and the language gets buried beneath the attempt to make it work on screen.

Michael Lesslie (co-writer of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and the 2015 Macbeth with Michael Fassbender) did the screenplay adaptation, cutting many characters and transferring some lines from one scene in the play to another. Hamlet now says, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy” to Ophelia, not Horatio. Most of that works smoothly enough. But some changes and additions are conspicuous and distracting when embedded within Shakespeare’s lines. You don’t have to know the play to realize that Shakespeare never wrote dialogue in which Hamlet talks about some Elsinore construction.

Karia also directed the 12-minute film The Long Goodbye, starring Ahmed. They wrote it together and as its producers won the 2022 Oscar for Best Live Action Short. It’s a sharp, harrowing piece about a South Asian family dragged out of their house by a right-wing militia, and it ends with Ahmed reciting a long rap-like poem. That combination of drama and poetry should have translated well to Hamlet, so it’s especially disappointing that their version, thoughtfully conceived though it is, is so uneven.