Hamlet: Riz Ahmed delivers the goods, but this punchy adaptation is a little too pared back

“Brevity is the soul of wit,” insists the verbose Polonius in Hamlet. The line could easily serve as this film’s motto, as it fearlessly carves out a lean contemporary psychological thriller from within Shakespeare’s expansive, wide-ranging, four-hour revenge tragedy. Reimagining the Danish court as a wealthy British Asian family business, Elsinore Construction, newly rocked by the sudden death of its founder, it swiftly unleashes a dazed then fiercely unravelling Hamlet (Riz Ahmed) who seeks revenge on his secretly murderous uncle Claudius.

Several defiantly original variations on Hamlet have made it to screen in recent months, including the videogame-staged Grand Theft Hamlet, the gender-swapped Hamlet anime Scarlet and the Hamlet origin story Hamnet; the decision to cleave to a pacy, pared-back version of the classic story confirms this as the most conventional adaptation of the bunch. Screenwriter Michael Lesslie may have stripped away everything except Hamlet’s own storyline and its key players (Horatio, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, is simply erased), to focus the film sternly on the hero’s POV. But this Hamlet’s cut-down rants and questioning soliloquies retain Shakespeare’s most memorable verses, which Ahmed delivers eloquently, quivering with deep feeling.

Their traditional Elizabethan stage language rubs up interestingly against the gritty, noirish visual mood that director Aneil Karia establishes as Hamlet wanders his family’s east London construction sites and their plush Essex mansion, gabbling with grief. Karia’s fleet-footed direction has some arresting cinematic flourishes, like Hamlet’s father’s ghost (Avijit Dutt) exhorting him to revenge on the roof of a crane-crowded high-rise. It makes a useful end to an otherwise narratively pointless excursion to a neon-drenched nightclub, where Hamlet snorts drugs to self-medicate his misery. Like the film’s persistent love of a shaky, handheld shot, this feels like a self-consciously hip, ‘How do you do, fellow kids?’ attempt to update the text. The hipness is even more overdone later, with Hamlet delivering his “To be or not to be” speech in a speeding sports car while threatening to crash it into an oncoming truck, a scene of thudding literalism which drowns out both the famous lines and their big existential questions.

Nonetheless, the film makes dramatically effective use of its British Asian setting, notably during Claudius’s lavish Indian wedding to Hamlet’s mother Gertrude in a giant, glittering east London function room. Choreographer Akram Khan creates a stunning grand guignol spectacle for the dance-play Hamlet subverts to recreate his father’s poisoning, a pile of bloodied hands dramatising the deed literally under Claudius’s nose. If only Art Malik’s overly restrained reaction as the uneasy Claudius didn’t take some of the sting out of it.
 

We get glimpses of his duplicity, but it is damped down, like Joe Alwyn’s biddable, thinly characterised Laertes and Morfydd Clark’s concerned (rather than crazed) Ophelia. This is the result of the film’s fevered concentration on Ahmed’s central performance: the whole film is arranged around it, with cinematographer Stuart Bentley’s camera fixated by close-ups of Ahmed’s quicksilver mood swings, and inevitably all the other characters (with the exception of Bollywood veteran Sheeba Chaddha’s guilt-drenched Gertrude) stay underdeveloped. They’re mostly figures for Hamlet to rail at or muse aloud to, with Timothy Spall rather wasted as a weaselly Polonius.

Karia’s tight focus on Hamlet’s spiral into madness, combined with the film’s commitment to realism, doesn’t allow for the kind of imaginative world-building featured in Baz Luhrmann’s exuberant Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Justin Kurzel’s tough, stylised 2015 Macbeth (where Lesslie’s terse, shaved-down Shakespearian dialogue fared better). Karia has created a tense, grabby thriller instead, which explodes into a satisfying welter of deaths and betrayals late on. Yet unlike his first collaboration with Ahmed, the Oscar-winning short The Long Goodbye (2020), whose racist militia now look horribly prescient, it lacks surprises and political punch. A sliver of subplot in which Elsinore Construction is revealed as a tyrannical slum landlord feels perfunctory, a nod to topicality. If you’re adapting a classic, you’d best bring something new and exhilarating to the mix (like Grand Theft Hamlet, whose characters actually do take arms against its sea of troubles) rather than trying to retrofit it into an existing genre.

Darting from self-hating soliloquy to death-dealing desperation, Ahmed is exciting to watch and completely in command of his material – a fine Hamlet, able to combine a multiplicity of moods to convey the character’s complexity. But this lean, mean, energetically modern take may leave you a little hungry for the rich philosophical meditation on mortality and existence that the full-fat Hamlet delivers.

► Hamlet is in UK cinemas now.