Writer: Michael Lesslie
Director: Aneil Karia
Riz Ahmed beings a speedy Hamlet to the BFI London Film Festival 2025, running at less than half of the full-length text, but this well-realised contemporary staging among the British Asian community brilliant marries these cultural traditions and expertly grafts them onto a 400-year-old story. Yet with the compression of numerous characters and large swathes of Shakespeare’s play abandoned, some of the motivations and logic is jettisoned, although Ahmed’s performance as the beleaguered prince gains in stature as the film unfolds.
Directed by Aneil Karia with a screenplay by Michael Lesslie, the world of Hamlet has undergone some rearrangement for this screen transfer. There are some interesting ideas like blending the secondary characters like Laertes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern into one person to keep Laertes at court and make him Hamlet’s friend; Ophelia and Horatio become one person slightly less successfully, building confidence between that at the beginning which adds weight to their status as a genuine couple but necessitates the removal of Horatio entirely from the plot once Ophelia returns to her old trajectory. It’s a strong idea that Hamlet confides his feigned madness in her but not one that’s followed through when later she shows no evidence of that conversation and follows the path Shakespeare laid out for her.
Some of the innovations are more successful, particularly the relocation of the action to an unscrupulous property company called Elsinore that has thrown scores of people out of their homes, now living in tented communities under the protection of the Fortinbras foundation – giving this urban, contemporary adaptation a touch of social consciousness. Useful too is the grand finale, no longer a sword fight but an intimate boardroom confrontation using one of the play’s other devices that gets the family where they need to be, while the removal of Claudius’ guilt speech leaves open some ambiguity about Hamlet’s own madness and the falsity of the ghost.
Ahmed has a good go at the role in its truncated form, a little hesitant at first although finding the bewilderment in the speeches, but he does grow stronger as Hamlet contemplates suicide by putting himself in a genuinely suicidal position, burning off the rage of his discoveries and as the Players antic finally give him the green light he needs, Ahmed really grasps control of the action and the language in the second half of the film, throwing off his feigned madness. By the time his Hamlet is ready to confront his mother and his uncle, Ahmed’s Hamlet is ready to embrace his fate and the performance is one of resigned vengeance.
But the film is most illuminating in bringing together the rituals of its British-Asian setting and Shakespeare’s story, staging a beautifully shot Indian wedding for Claudius (a wonderful Art Malik) and Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha, underused but lending gravitas), the rituals of burial for Hamlet senior and the wonderful interpretation of the play-within-a-play, told through dance. Some of the characterisation suffers from being so truncated but there is method in this madness that reminds us of the great universality of this play and what it means to grieve.
Hamlet is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 8-19 October.
