Hamlet Is A Visceral, Much-Needed Shakespearean Remix

It’s an unspoken rule for anyone who cares even a little bit about Shakespeare: don’t try to adapt Hamlet. The Bard’s most famous tragedy might also be the most impossible to commit to the screen. Yes, it’s a searing, immersive study in grief; a timeless treatise on the sins of the father. It’s also the role of a lifetime for any actor worth his salt, a rare opportunity to access the emotions that men are too often told to tamp down in favor of playing it cool. But Shakespeare’s cautionary tale about ego and legacy is all too easily turned into a monument to male fragility. Modern adaptations of the play are alienating at best, and grossly indulgent in the whims of their leads at worst.

That’s probably the least-gracious reading of a text as iconic, as enduring, as Hamlet’s — but titans like Kenneth Branagh and Ethan Hawke have spent decades proving how dangerously true it can be. It’s likely why we haven’t gotten a mainstream adaptation of Hamlet in over 20 years: you’ve seen one “to be or not to be,” haven’t you seen them all?

It’s that question that the latest incarnation of Hamlet, like it or not, is bid to answer. Fortunately, the gauntlet now falls at the feet of Riz Ahmed, one of the most affecting (and still, somehow, underrated) performers of his generation. Ahmed reteams with director Aneil Karia — with whom he won an Oscar for their short film, The Long Goodbye — to bring the Prince of Denmark to the crowded streets of West London. Their take on Hamlet is the very definition of lean and mean, stripping Shakespeare’s robust text of all its fat... and of any scene that doesn’t involve Hamlet directly.

The madness of Ophelia, the drollery of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and even the skull of poor Yorick have all been excised from Karia’s adaptation. But this Hamlet gains plenty in its simplicity, to say nothing of its ruthlessness. This story is still about a man mourning his father, the King (Avijitt Dutt), and striving to punish those he deems responsible for his demise. Those themes of revenge haven’t dulled in the 200-odd years between Shakespeare’s day and ours — that Hamlet’s mother Gertrude (Sheeba Chadha) is set to marry his uncle Claudius (Art Malik) to preserve their empire should still be shocking and strange — but Hamlet finds ways to make this story even edgier. Ahmed delivers the Prince’s iconic soliloquy from behind the wheel of a speeding car, contemplating what it really means “to sleep, perchance to dream” as he drifts into oncoming traffic. This Hamlet has its foot on the gas and spite in its veins. It can’t completely justify the need for another version of this tragedy, but it sure has a lot of fun trying.

It certainly helps that, after a revolving door of blond-haired, blue-eyed Hamlets, Karia and Ahmed present a challenge to the status quo. Transposing Shakespeare into the present day is, again, a difficult task — but this classic text finds surprising parallels with the cultures and customs of the South Asian diaspora. Hamlet is a grounded remix, taking on the tone of a crime thriller rather than striving for a heady ghost story. And by making it specific to Ahmed and the London he knows, it already feels like a radical retelling. We’re firmly in Hamlet’s shoes as he goes through the motions of his father’s funeral. Verses of an ancient Hindu text, and condolences muttered in Hindi, are the only words we hear in the film’s opening moments. As the late King Hamlet’s funeral comes to a close, our cast drops into Shakespeare’s original text — a divisive choice that nearly breaks the spell, were it not for other tricks up Karia’s sleeve.

So many Shakespeare adaptations have been undone by their unctuous allegiance to the Bard: they indulge in every word as-written, hoping that audiences will remember enough from their high school British Lit class to get the gist. This Hamlet is not so precious with its source material — it repurposes iconic lines in different scenes and does away with others entirely — but it shoulders Shakespeare’s text with enough conviction to get its point across. Karia and screenwriter Michael Lesslie take clever liberties updating this story otherwise: the castle of Elsinore has been rebranded into a high-end construction firm, while Fortinbras (the Norwegian prince plotting Denmark’s downfall) becomes the namesake of an unhoused community taking refuge in the guts of an unfinished high-rise. That building becomes the battleground for the bulk of Hamlet’s conflicts, offering Ahmed and Karia a neat catch-all for the story’s many consolidated plotlines.

Stuart Bentley also meets us halfway with immersive cinematography. The static shots that define King Hamlet’s funeral quickly give way to erratic, handheld sequences as Hamlet learns of his mother’s upcoming nuptials and encounters the ghost of his father, losing his grip on reality. That claustrophobic closeness rears its head again and again: after charged scenes between Hamlet and his one-time sweetheart, Ophelia (Morfydd Clark), or opposite her father, Polonius (an eerie Timothy Spall), it feels less like we’re a fly on the wall observing Hamlet’s descent, and more like Hamlet’s accomplice. We lurk over his shoulder as he plots the next step in his revenge plot; we’re sitting in the passenger seat of his car as he asks to be or not to be, speeding towards a semi-truck. It’s a nice touch for a story determined to keep its leading man isolated and unmoored — yes, the version of the tale ends just as all the others do, but it gets bonus points for ensuring we’re not left behind.

Ahmed likewise does his best to convey Hamlet’s anguish, and his best is more than enough. His incarnation of the Dane is at once boyish, vindictive, helpless, and feral, a lightning rod for this ever-scattered story. It’s easy to forgive the film’s choice to minimize his supporting players: we may not get Polonius’ “to thine own self be true” or Hamlet’s duel with a grief-stricken Laertes (a great Joe Alwyn), but Karia constructs this story in such a way that you don’t really miss it. Of course, that may be because we’ve already gotten so many other adaptations that claim to be “definitive” (like Branagh’s, which retained and even expanded upon Shakespeare’s text). Either way, the director and his star take that legacy, checkered as it is, and turn it into an asset. While their tragic hero grapples with being or not being, the duo craft an adaptation that is and isn’t the Hamlet we recognize, and is all the better for it.

Hamlet premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.