Adapting William Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy is an ambitious, often perilous endeavour. The text is so universally known that bringing something fresh to the table requires both a profound respect for the original material and the audacity to tear it down and rebuild it. In this razor-sharp, fearlessly cinematic reimagining, director Aneil Karia and star Riz Ahmed have accomplished exactly that.
By stripping away the excess and transplanting the Danish royal court into the heart of a wealthy British South Asian family in contemporary London, this Hamlet transforms from a sweeping epic into a breathless, culturally vibrant psychological thriller.
The Storyline: A Lean, Mean Revenge Thriller
Screenwriter Michael Lesslie makes the controversial but ultimately brilliant choice to carve away much of the play’s periphery. You won’t find Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, or even Horatio here. Instead, the narrative zeroes in with laser focus on Hamlet’s deeply personal spiral into grief and depression.
The story opens with a haunting Hindu funeral, complete with the Gayatri Mantra and cremation imagery—instantly grounding the film in its unique cultural setting. The “kingdom” is now a powerful family business, Elsinore Construction, rocked by the sudden death of its patriarch. When Hamlet returns to London, he is blindsided by the lavish, glittering wedding of his mother, Gertrude, to his calculating uncle, Claudius. The ensuing narrative trades castle ramparts for neon-streaked London streets, blingy nightclubs, and high-rise construction cranes, making the Prince’s descent into madness feel urgently, dangerously modern.
Riz Ahmed’s Towering Performance
To put it simply, Riz Ahmed is magnificent. In a role that demands everything, he leaves it all on the screen.
Ahmed approaches the Prince of Denmark not as a theatrical caricature feigning madness, but as an intensely wounded, traumatized man fundamentally broken by grief. When he delivers the iconic soliloquies, he does so with a raw, hushed desperation that forces the audience to lean in. We see his unravelling in real-time whether he is navigating a drug-fueled haze in an East London club or confronting the ghost of his father. He commands the screen entirely, injecting the film with a kinetic, unpredictable energy that makes the centuries-old dialogue feel like it was written yesterday.
The Supporting Cast
While the film is undeniably “The Riz Ahmed Show,” the supporting cast anchors his volatile performance with superb, lived-in authenticity:
- Sheeba Chaddha (Gertrude): Chaddha delivers a quietly powerful performance as Hamlet’s mother, capturing the complex, uneasy guilt of a woman trying to hold her fracturing family together.
- Art Malik (Claudius): Malik is a menacing presence. He plays the usurping uncle not with mustache-twirling villainy, but with the cold, calculated pragmatism of a ruthless modern CEO.
- Avijit Dutt (The Ghost): In a masterful stroke of cultural integration, the ghost of Hamlet’s father speaks to him from the shadows in subtitled Hindi, adding an eerie, deeply personal layer to the haunting.
- Morfydd Clark (Ophelia) & Joe Alwyn (Laertes): While their roles are slightly pared back to make room for Hamlet’s overwhelming POV, Clark and Alwyn deliver compelling, subdued performances that highlight the collateral damage of the central family’s toxic power struggle.
- Timothy Spall (Polonius): Spall brings a dark, enforcer-like edge to the role of the traditionally verbose advisor.
The Verdict
Karia and Ahmed who previously collaborated on the Oscar-winning short The Long Goodbye have crafted a Hamlet that is more interested in the visceral reality of human emotion than in preserving theatrical traditions. Cinematographer Stuart Bentley captures the tension beautifully with handheld, gritty camerawork, while the use of traditional South Asian elements (like a show-stopping play-within-a-play choreographed by Akram Khan) ensures the film has an identity entirely its own.
It is a powerful, burningly emotional film that proves Shakespeare’s masterwork is boundless. If you are looking for a traditional, four-hour Elizabethan stage play, look elsewhere. But if you want to see a mesmerizing, unapologetic actor rip the beating heart out of a classic, Riz Ahmed’s Hamlet is a must-watch.
About the Author
