Aneil Karia's HAMLET: The Review

Revenge, Remedy and Riz Ahmed's incendiary performance

Hamlet opens not with intrigue or courtly menace, but with finality. The closing of the cremation chamber around Hamlet’s father, flames engulfing the coffin as the title appears, feels less like exposition and more like a psychological severing. From this moment, the son is no longer in possession of his passions. Grief does not pass through him. It seals him.

Shortly after, Hamlet slips his father’s ring onto his finger. It is an intimate gesture, but also a binding one. Marriage is the right word for it. He is now wedded to duty, to revenge, to a debt that cannot be repaid without annihilating whatever sense of self might otherwise have formed. This version of Hamlet does not choose vengeance so much as inherit it. The decision to situate parts of the film within London council estates is inspired. Their concrete passageways and oppressive geometry carry a weight that feels borrowed from the most unforgiving turn in the weather. Few structures can communicate such bleakness. Castles, fittingly, are among them. Where a castle suggests sanctuary, privilege and inherited strength, the estate offers the inverse: exposure, vulnerability, and the erosion of interior life. With this backdrop to his awakening madness, Hamlet’s fragility feels not symbolic, but visceral. The appearance of the Ghost in such a setting forces a reassessment of its meaning. In traditional stagings, emerging from a period where belief in apparitions was commonplace, the Ghost is often accepted at face value.

Here, in a contemporary world more attuned to mental health than metaphysical certainty, the encounter invites a different reading. Rather than a visitation from beyond, the Ghost may equally be understood as the manifestation of a mind unable to metabolise grief. The haunting becomes internal. The estate does not shelter him from these thoughts. It amplifies them. This inward turn sharpens the play’s focus on psychology rather than villainy. Claudius, the Uncle, remains a curiously thin character. His monstrosity is conferred almost entirely by his deed. That absence of depth only reinforces the sense that Hamlet is less concerned with evil as an external force, and more with the disintegration of the self under moral pressure. The play emerges, once again, as an exploration of the human condition rather than a morality tale.

There are moments where the film falters. The death of Polonius, played with characteristic deftness by Timothy Spall, is undermined by an overuse of handheld camerawork. The attempt to induce disorientation feels unnecessary, even dated. The audience is perfectly capable of entering the chaos without the shepherding of such insistent whistling. Sometimes there needs to be more trust in the intelligence of its witness. One line, however, lands with particular force. When Hamlet tells an inhabitant of a makeshift refugee camp, “Give me a voice,” it feels like a confession disguised as a plea. Hamlet has met his father’s death without an established sense of self, and into that void pours the only thing available to him: a destructive debt of vengeance. Insanity here is not excess, but absence. Ophelia’s death is handled with quiet brutality. We do not see her die. We see her body loaded, unceremoniously, into the back of an ambulance, while her brother turns his fury on Hamlet. Revenge spreads like contagion. The male torment occupies centre stage, while the woman’s suffering bears the additional burden of bearing no witness. It is an elegant statement for an ugly truth that remains stubbornly current.

The integration of Indian cultural elements throughout the film is one of its most striking achievements. The traditional Indian dancing staged on the grounds of the stately home heightens the Uncle’s ominous presence. A place that has drawn its stability from tradition and status quo is suddenly unsettled by an incongruity that feels almost uncanny. Hamlet’s suffocating venom for the newly enthroned Uncle is dialled up as a result. Yet elsewhere, this same cultural layering reveals unexpected harmony. The shared values and rituals between Indian and English heritage emerge organically, never feeling prescriptive or tokenistic. In our time marked by cultural division, it is unexpectedly moving to find optimism nestled within a tragedy. This continuity extends to costume. The wardrobe of the Indian wedding draws a natural, almost seamless comparison with Elizabethan dress, reminding us that pageantry, hierarchy, and symbolic display are not relics of a single culture or era.

The play within the film, staged to expose Claudius’s guilt, is brilliantly theatrical. Seen through the lens of our own psychology, it resembles the way imagination often constructs elaborate internal scenarios in an attempt to draw out the bad actors lurking in our shadow. Ghosts, real or otherwise, have always been effective directors of our lesser nature. Inevitably, attention turns to the soliloquy. “To be, or not to be” arrives not in stillness, but with road-gorging thrust. A high speed car chase replaces the contemplative pause, Hamlet pursued by nothing more tangible than his own anguish. The unfamiliar build up to the most familiar words pays off. The sequence crystallises the magnitude of the question without diluting it. Film is at its best when it refuses to release you long after the credits roll, when it provokes meaningful inquiry rather than closure. That is what the climax of this scene makes clear, the answer is forced upon us by an instinct that is not our own. The final deaths of Hamlet and Claudius are framed with quiet poetry. They lie beneath two trees whose roots intertwine underground, while their branches stretch upward, unable to meet as they compete for the same impossible magic of the Sun. Reconciliation exists, but it is buried beneath the surface.

At the centre of it all is Riz Ahmed, whose performance is incendiary. He brings the same relentless energy that defines his finest work, filling Hamlet with a skilful balance of reverence and abandon. The role demands intelligence without preciousness, volatility without indulgence, and Ahmed delivers both. If his name is not already being spoken in connection with the future of Bond, there is something very rotten in the state of that franchise. There will always be resistance to modernising Shakespeare. Much of it stems from the laboured way the text is introduced in schools, and from the way it has been elevated by self appointed intellectuals to a place so lofty it becomes uninhabitable. People so lofty they sound as if they shit marble, to borrow from Milos Forman’s Amadeus.

Karia’s interpretation exposes the falsity of that distance. Hamlet is not an artefact. It is not culturally bound. Its themes are immune to anachronism or ownership because they belong to every time and place. Any reimagining that invites a wider audience into that universality should be welcomed. The communal act of cinema exists precisely for this purpose. Film succeeds not only when it entertains or moves us, but when it offers utility. Perhaps Shakespeare understood something we have since obscured. Being human has less to do with relentless self interrogation, a very modern affliction, and more to do with recognising that the only remedy for life is the company of the living. His gift may simply have been the humility and the nerve to look.

ADAM BELL

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