Karia, who previously worked with Ahmed on their Oscar-winning short The Long Goodbye, doesn’t have a clear vision of what this new Hamlet should look like. The handheld camera tries to inject physical intensity when words are doing all the work, giving the feature a sloppy style. At one point during an intimate conversation between Hamlet and Ophelia (Morfydd Clark), the camera is so unsteady, her head nearly hits all four corners of the screen. There are also inexplicable zooms, drone-shot pan outs, and choppy cuts diluting the intensity of the performances. A few scenes shine through the messy cinematography, like the doomed wedding sequence, but even that feels rushed and truncated, rapidly intercutting reaction shots of each character between the dancers performing the play that Hamlet requests of his father’s murder. Cinematographer Stuart Bentley, who previously shot the romantic drama We Live In Time, is capable of thoughtful compositions and camera movements, which means this aesthetic was a purposeful, miscalculated attempt at looking hip, fast, and unencumbered by the proscenium bonds of its predecessors. Yet, even YouTubers and TikTokers understand the power of a tripod.
When the movie begins with Hamlet’s father’s funeral, the grief-stricken son is performing traditional funerary rites with other male members of his family, hinting that this version of the Bard’s play would do more to explore the immigrant experience in England. But that quickly falls by the wayside—although we do have plenty of intra-family strife. In that department, Hamlet has never let us down. Adapted for the screen by Michael Lesslie, this Hamlet pares back certain lines while shoehorning in extra details to modernize the text without changing it drastically. The cultural specificity is really only brought up again when Elsinore, now the name of a housing development, is revealed to be a questionable project that’s displaced people. Once again, that change is waved off screen almost as quickly as it’s brought on. These trims also lose some of the side characters’ motives and descents into madness, most notably Ophelia, which makes the overall narrative more confusing and gives the actors less to do. She spends much of her time looking annoyed and somewhat concerned about her boyfriend’s outburst at the wedding, but nothing more, so her fatal trek to a watery grave is more of a logical jump than the next tragedy in a long line of death.
Ahmed’s performance somewhat salvages this version of Hamlet from being a complete flop. It’s a subtle interpretation for the screen, one meant for close-ups to capture his face as he winces when learning of his mother and uncle’s nuptials or his boyish annoyance of Ophelia, which is mostly conveyed in whispered dialogue and stern looks. But Karia’s commitment to turning his Hamlet into a sloppy Michael Bay knockoff makes it impossible to fully appreciate Ahmed’s work. His delivery of “To be or not to be” takes place as he’s recklessly driving a sports car, but the scene looks weirdly stiff, shot from the passenger window as he’s staring ahead grumbling to himself. It’s an anticlimactic performance of one of the most important soliloquies in the English language, and it certainly doesn’t help the source material look any younger. As Polonius, Timothy Spall is really the only one to match Ahmed’s intensity, and Chaddha holds a few great moments on her own, but their scenes with Ahmed are too brief to inject any real tension. Unfortunately, Ahmed is really the only one who gets to shine in the cast.
There are some interesting concepts in this version of Hamlet that go unexplored, and at least a few performances that would have been better served if the camera could stop inducing motion sickness. But Karia is too checked out, too uninterested at seeing the film’s new ideas through, and too committed to using understated performances that barely register on a screen that looks like it’s all on a swaying ship. The play’s the thing, but only if we can see it.
Director: Aneil Karia
Writer: Michael Lesslie
Starring: Riz Ahmed, Art Malik, Sheeba Chaddha, Joe Alwyn, Morfyyd Clark, Timothy Spall
Release Date: April 10, 2026
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