Hamlet Review: Tragedy Minus Time

Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy has been remade so many times, some novelty is required to justify another spin at the wheel. Director Aneil Karia and screenwriter Michael Lesslie make just such a case in the opening minutes of their adaptation, which reinvents the Danish royals as the super-wealthy family of a South Asian real estate mogul in modern-day London. The film begins solemnly, as Hamlet (Riz Ahmed, who also produces) tends to his dead father’s body during a traditional Hindu burial rite. Uncertain, he looks to his uncle Claudius (Art Malik, quietly impactful), who gently coaches him. This bolt of tenderness is not something you see in most productions – a humanizing connection between Hamlet and Claudius before the latter’s true villainy is discovered – and the film strikingly recalls the moment much later when uncle washes blood off his nephew.   

Tellingly, not a word of the Bard’s text is spoken in either scene. The film’s high point – in which the traveling troupe of actors hired by Hamlet to “catch the conscience of the king” is replaced by wedding dancers – is thrillingly choreographed (by Akram Khan), performed, and blocked for the camera … and also, quite notably, wordless. The problem with this Hamlet is when somebody opens their mouth and starts spouting Shakespeare’s lines. 

And it’s not even that many of Shakespeare’s lines. With the exception of Kenneth Branagh’s four-hours-long version back in 1996, film adaptations of Hamlet tend to nip and tuck the text. Still, what Lesslie and Karia have done here is about as aggressive an abridgement as you can imagine. 

The plot points, in case you slept through that unit in high school: With eyebrow-raising swiftness, Claudius announces he’s marrying his dead brother’s widow, Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha), and taking over the family business. Then the ghost of Hamlet’s dead dad informs Hamlet he was murdered and demands vengeance, sending his son on a quest that alarms and alienates everyone around him, the guilty and the blameless (hey-o, Ophelia) alike. The body count by curtain fall is ludicrously high. 

Lesslie more effectively translated Shakespeare to screen in 2015’s spare but still full-feeling Macbeth. This Hamlet is all sparsity. It streamlines the play so savagely, the plot points are all that remain. It eliminates the character of Horatio (and anybody else who can corroborate seeing the dead king) and shaves Ophelia’s relationships to Hamlet and her father down to a nub. It removes eavesdroppers and bystanders from scenes that crucially need that extra layer of tension. It turns Fortinbras into a half-baked symbol of housing rights and contrives a new legacy left to him without investing any energy in making it feel emotionally or intellectually true as the next step in Hamlet’s burn-the-house-down campaign.       

This is all to advance a more minimalist vision, which means there’s nowhere to hide. Ahmed – an Oscar nominee in 2021 for Sound of Metal whose previous collaboration with Karia, an outgrowth of Ahmed’s hip-hop album The Long Goodbye, won the Oscar for Best Narrative Short Film in 2022 – has the confident cadence of a guy who’s been rapping since he was a teenager (something he winningly showed off in an SNL UK skit last week as a urologist with surprise flow), and he has no problem working his mouth around the language. He’s at his best when he’s all coiled energy, but Karia keeps boxing him in and then pulling the cork. The “to be or not be” soliloquy, delivered while driving a car at high speed, is a disaster: The immobile camera only captures his profile, and he screams through most of it, maybe just to be heard over the engine roar. Where was the director’s guiding hand, his ear for modulation? It was evident in those beautifully restrained, wordless scenes between uncle and nephew, but went missing again when Joe Alwyn dropped to his knees in a wincing pantomime of grief. The final takeaway isn’t tragedy. It’s histrionics.

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This article appears in April 10 • 2026.