“Who’s there?”
“Nay, and answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.”
The two opening lines of Shakespeare’s most enduring tragedy, delivered by two palace guards, actually set the tone for the rest of the play. Who *is* there? Yes, we know the characters, most notably the play’s central figure, Hamlet, the prince of Denmark returning home to Elsinore after the death of his father, the king. We know of his uncle, Claudius, and his mother, the Queen. We know of Polonius, the chief counsellor of Claudius, and of his children, Laertes and Ophelia. As the play unfolds, we see the scheming that takes place on all sides, we see the moral corruption of a Queen marrying her dead king’s brother, we see the revenge that Hamlet’s ghostly father demands he take, and we must wrestle with the issues of appearance and reality: is what we’re seeing true? Or must we dig deeper and “unfold” people and events to discover the heart of the treachery at play?
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is so enduring precisely because its twin themes of moral corruption and both familial and societal dysfunction and revenge (and how revenge is a complicated matter) find themselves present and relevant across time, and across cultures.
Two film adaptations of Hamlet that I am most familiar with are the 1948 version (directed by Laurence Olivier, who also starred as Hamlet) and the 1996 version (directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also played the titular role). I saw Branagh’s version at the cinema – a completely unabridged version, running more than four hours. For me, there are two interesting adaptations from India that truly show how universal Shakespeare’s themes can be. The first, Haider – directed by Vishal Bhardwaj (no stranger to adapting Shakespeare, having also adapted Macbeth as Maqbool, and Othello as Omkara), the film is set in the fraught political climate of Kashmir. The second, Karmayogi, a Malayalam language film from 2012, is a fairly faithful adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, but adapted to a myth of the Yogi clan of northern Kerala. If anything, both these adaptations prove the point: Hamlet’s themes remain relevant today because they are universal and timeless.
Which brings us to Aneil Karia’s 2026 film adaptation of the play, with a screenplay written by Michael Lesslie, and starring Riz Ahmed as Hamlet. Karia’s film is contemporary and modern, set in London’s wealthy South Asian community. The core of the story remains the same: Hamlet returns to his grand family home for his father’s funeral, only to discover his uncle Claudius will be marrying his newly widowed mother, Gertrude (a splendid Sheeba Chaddha). Visited by the ghost of his father, Hamlet begins a quest for vengeance, that spirals into everything around him – and within him – unravelling.
But that’s where the similarity ends. This Hamlet is a stripped-down adaptation, setting a number characters aside and limiting the roles of others. The cold, distant palace of Elsinore (I have been to Elsinore, as a side trip from a very hot and humid Copenhagen, and the wind off the Baltic Sea was icy, leaving me to imagine that Shakespeare made a very good choice to set such an unforgiving play in such an unforgiving climate) is transformed into a ruthless construction conglomerate. The film’s pacing begins slowly, with Hamlet going through the rituals honouring his dead father, almost numb to what is happening. As an aside: I lost my own father a couple of months ago, and Ahmed’s portrayal of the grief of those early days rang so true to my own experience (apart from the family scheming). I felt as if I was going through the motions, that it all seemed so unreal. For me, my father’s cremation felt like a sending off; for Hamlet, the burst of flames seems to be what ignites him to get to the bottom of what is rotten in his family.
It’s the encounter with the spirit of his dead father (Avijit Dutt) that breaks Hamlet’s already fragile, grieving spirit. It’s at this point that the film moves into a chaotic, breakneck pacing that never lets up until it reaches its brutal climax. The most famous soliloquy of the play, “To be, or not to be”, is delivered while Hamlet is speeding down a highway on the wrong side of the road, very much seeming as in this moment he is choosing “not to be”. This speed and its tight close-up on Ahmed’s performance gives that moment an absolute manic energy., revealing a man at his breaking point in his existence). And, yet, it retains the original Hamlet’s indecision, layering it with confusion and, yes, madness.
I’ll admit that it takes some adjusting to adapt to the very Elizabethan stage language (the film retains this from Shakespeare) against the grit of east end London construction sites lavish wedding venues (the marriage of Claudius and Gertrude, which includes the stunning play within the play representing the death of the king, reimagined as a Kathak fusion and choreographed by Akram Khan) and an almost noir thriller atmosphere. Everything hinges on Ahmed’s performance. That said, Art Malik steals moments away from Ahmed with his restrained yet commanding portrayal of Claudius, as does Timothy Spall as a manipulative , scheming Polonius.
In the end, Ahmed’s performance is commanding, intense, agonizing. His Hamlet is fully disillusioned by what he sees, by his family, by those close to him. The camera’s tight shots on him render him vulnerable at the same time as his disillusionment spins into anger, as his inaction finally turns to action. There is an urgency in this bold, modern, visceral adaptation, that is compelling viewing. Or, to call back to Shakespeare: “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.”