Aneil Karia’s condensed adaptation retools Shakespeare’s masterpiece into a superficial contemporary story.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News

A daring, if also too deeply cut adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” arguably the world’s greatest play, transported from late Middle Ages Denmark to modern-day London’s elite South Asian community, Aneil Karia’s “Hamlet” gives us British Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed (“Sound of Metal”) as a new version of Shakespeare’s melancholy Dane, and he is terrific.

Genuinely haunted as the grieving son, whose beloved father, a corporate giant also named Hamlet (Avijit Dutt), has died suddenly, Ahmed, clad not in an “inky cloak,” but in a plain white tunic, powerfully expresses Hamlet’s unhappiness concerning the too hasty marriage of his uncle Claudius (Art Malik, TV’s “Borgia”) and his newly widowed mother Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha). Hamlet’s worst suspicions are confirmed by his encounter with his father’s ghost, who tells him outright how he was poisoned and killed. “The time is out of joint,” Hamlet himself famously observes.

Hamlet suspects that Polonius. (Timothy Spall, who played Rosencrantz in Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 screen version of “Hamlet”) is Claudius’ puppet. Polonius is also the father of his friend Laertes (Joe Alwyn) and his beloved Ophelia (a very promising Morfydd Clark).

Riz Ahmed in a scene from "Hamlet," directed by Aneil Karia. (Vertical)
Riz Ahmed in a scene from “Hamlet,” directed by Aneil Karia. (Vertical)

The screenplay adapted by Michael Lesslie (“The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes”) removes Polonius’ most noteworthy characteristic: his long-winded speeches, including his iconic “To thine ownself be true” instruction to Laertes. Ophelia, too, is deprived of her trademark mad scene after Hamlet’s rejection of her and his murder of her father. Instead, Ophelia drowns herself out of grief and is unseemingly removed from the film in the back of an ambulance.

This new “Hamlet,” which is set in the family’s palatial home and grounds, follows hard upon the heels of Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet,” a brilliant Academy Award-winning kind of “Hamlet” origin film. Of course, Laurence Olivier directed a classic 1948 film version of “Hamlet” with him in the title role (and a hilarious Peter Cushing as Osric and an uncredited Christopher Lee as a palace guard). More recently, we’ve had the aforementioned Irish actor-director Branagh play the role, along with Mel Gibson in 1990 in Franco Zeffirelli’s film, and Ethan Hawke in Michael Almereyda’s 2000 re-imagining of the play (Bill Murray as Polonius), set in modern-day New York City.

This new film’s dialogue is faithful to the text, but it, too, has been edited to create a one-hour, 54-minute version of the play that can run up to five hours on stage. Branagh’s aforementioned film version runs just over four hours. The character named Horatio, Hamlet’s best friend, has been removed entirely. Hamlet’s soliloquies are pared down, too, by Lesslie, but mostly survive. Ahmed does not address the camera directly during the soliloquies. His Hamlet speaks his thoughts aloud to fill us in on what he truly believes. In one misconceived scene, Hamlet goes with friends to a nightclub with strippers, where he drinks alcohol and snorts what we assume to be cocaine just before encountering his father’s ghost in an alley. Ophelia and Laertes speak some of Horatio’s lines, which I found distracting. Ophelia becomes Ophelia-Horatio more or less, emphasis on less.

Ahmed’s Hamlet enlists Asian players to perform a short scene he scripted, prompting Claudius and Gertrude to reveal their guilt through their reactions. Hamlet attends the players’ performance in lipstick and minimalist drag, playing the show’s host and doing something lewd with a microphone, all of which I found a bit silly and presumably designed to make this radical “Hamlet” more hip and sexually fluid. In one cross-cultural moment, Hamlet confronts an effigy of Ganesha, the Hindu god of prosperity and new beginnings. Oh, the irony. The duels and poisonings at the end of “Hamlet” have been reduced to a toast with tainted wine and a stabbing in a small wood. In spite of a powerful performance from Ahmed and a nicely atmospheric score by Maxwell Sterling, this “Hamlet” has been so stripped down and streamlined that it’s become a mere shadow of Shakespeare’s masterpiece.

‘Hamlet’

Rating: R, violence, profanity, brief drug use

Cast: Riz Ahmed, Morfydd Clark, Art Malik, Joe Alwyn

Director: Aneil Karia

Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes

Where to Watch: In theaters

Grade: B-