William Shakespeare might have foreseen that one day, the entire world would become Hamlet. Could he have guessed that Joe Alwyn would be at its center?
In Hamnet, Alwyn showed up as Shakespeare’s brother-in-law. Taylor Swift may have avoided “The Fate of Ophelia,” but she didn’t escape having Alwyn join her gallery of exes. Now, here Alwyn is as Laertes in Aneil Karia’s new adaptation of the tragedy itself.
Despite the connective tissue with the rest of the 2020s Hamletverse, Karia’s Hamlet has a ready answer to the question of what makes this different from the dozens of feature adaptations preceding it. Karia, who won an Oscar for his 2020 short The Long Goodbye, reunites with lead actor Riz Ahmed for Shakespeare set among prosperous members of London’s South Asian community.
Karia’s Hamlet is deeply internal, with Michael Lesslie’s screenplay providing the basis for a film that invites us to lean forward in our seats to follow the hushed tones of Hamlet’s monologues. It’s a compelling technique for depicting a character talking to himself: Hamlet finds private spaces to pop off, most memorably while racing his luxury car down the wrong lane while deciding whether “to be or not to be.”
The film’s intimacy, though, grows constricting. The contrast to Hamnet is striking, providing juicy term-paper fodder for any universities willing to risk their federal funding by examining films other than The Patriot and Home Alone 2.
Whereas Hamnet dramatizes the role of live theater in catalyzing shared emotional expression, Karia’s Hamlet locks us into the title character’s racing, flailing mind. Ophelia (Morfyyd Clark) can’t break through, and neither can we. The Grand Guignol climax, in A24 terms, aims for Hereditary but lands closer to Beau Is Afraid.
Still, Karia takes some big swings and when they connect, they make for memorable moments. The actors Hamlet sets up to shock his stepfather are, here, dancers whose contemporary Kathak invocation of King Hamlet’s murder is a maximalist tour de force (choreographed by Akram Khan) that gives a new meaning to dinner theater.
The film also finds traction in some quieter moments, the best of which play to Ahmed’s wit. Watch him when he learns his mother plans to grieve her husband by marrying her brother-in-law. Ahmed delivers a slight, are-you-serious scoff: the kind of gesture that would be hard to pull off onstage, but that movie cameras were made for. In so tightly narrowing its frame, however, this cinematic Hamlet ends up giving us too much of a good thing.
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