Shakespeare by Southwest or, The Ghostlight & Grand Theft Hamlet Reviews

There’s something in the air at this year’s SXSW. It’s not the heat (that’s conspicuously absent), it’s not the smell of barbecue (that’s sadly absent), and it’s not the conversations that start with “Hey bro, check out my latest bitcoin enterprise where you can be your own boss!” (that’s being subconsciously blocked out). Instead, what’s occupying the air is something much more classic…something Shakespearean. It’s a surprise that in all of SXSW’s film programming blocks, “Shakespeare on Film” wasn’t a slot as there is not one, but two, films showing which deal with the power and emotion of a William Shakespeare play.

Funnily enough, Kelly O’ Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s Ghostlight and Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls’ Grand Theft Hamlet share a lot of similarities. Both are premiering at SXSW this year (the former making its “Texas Premiere” and the latter making its “World Premiere”). Both are the result of its creators grappling with the straining isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic—with O’Sullivan, a member of the Chicago theater scene, looking to scratch her itch for stage writing while under lockdown, and Crane and Grylls, who act and direct respectively, also wanting to keep their skills fresh while trapped at home. Both films’ stories deal with their characters stuck in a creative and personal rut finding salvation through a Shakespeare play. Most importantly, both films are pretty damn good!

The main difference between Ghostlight and Grand Theft Hamlet is that the former is a narrative feature and the latter is a documentary. O’ Sullivan and Thompson’s film is a family dramedy that focuses on the plight of Dan (a stellar and eye-opening Keith Kupferer), a middle-aged family man who finds a way to explore his family tragedy through the classic tale of Romeo & Juliet.

Crane and Grylls’ film also centers around middle-aged men, except here they’re a pair of British actors (Crane and his friend Mark Oosterveen) who find themselves out of work as Britain undergoes a third lockdown in 2021. While Ghostlight is filled with real-life humans on screen, Grand Theft Hamlet is shot entirely in the virtual world of a video game, Grand Theft Auto Online (GTA:O).

And where Ghostlight explores trauma, Grand Theft Hamlet explores artistic perseverance (and lots of online trolling) as Crane and Oosterveen attempt to keep their acting fresh by putting on a production of Hamlet. The catch is that the performance is held within GTA:O’s violent and expansive world, where, surprisingly, the actors discover other online players who also have the same itch for doing a bit of Shakespeare to pass the time being stowed away at home.

 Ghostlight and Grand Theft Hamlet benefit from having strong central anchors in their main performers. In Ghostlight, Keith Kupferer plays Dan as a soft-spoken father and husband who spends the day idling in thought at his construction job before letting the nights pass by with TV watches with his daughter, Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), and wife, Sharon (Tara Mallen). There’s a subtle, unspoken love between the three—it helps that in real life the trio are an actual family—but there’s also pain brewing in each of them. Keith Kupferer is marvelous as he guides Dan from a man holding in the pain to one slowly opening up through the power of community theater. The actor takes Dan from his quiet and pained beginnings to an emotionally open man who embraces past trauma to bring life to the tale of doomed young love he decides to act in. For a character that goes through so many big moments of sadness and happiness, Keith Kupferer (with O’ Sullivan’s script along with O’ Sullivan and Thompson’s directing) keeps Dan grounded in reality, creating a character that looks and sounds like someone you’d see on the street, hardly aware of the emotional battle they’re fighting internally.

Crane and Oosterveen are objectively in lighter territory in their tale. Seeing them concoct their plans to put on Hamlet in GTA:O (eventually bringing in Grylls to document their project) is enjoyable because the two main subjects clearly have a passion for their mission. There’s nothing more magical in life or in the movies than seeing people get together for one crazy dream idea and slowly, but surely, bringing it to life. Thanks to their performance backgrounds, Crane and Oosterveen make most of their planning and idle conversations ring with that sort of natural bombast and theater kid energy that can only come from real-life actors. When the moments of frustration and self-doubt do creep in at certain points in the documentary, it’s easy for audiences to want to see these guys win.

 The one caveat is there are certain moments in Grand Theft Hamlet and Ghostlight that feel a bit too emotionally manufactured. In Grand Theft Hamlet, this sense of inauthenticity appears in scenes that deal with Crane, Oossterveen, or Grylls butting heads. Documentaries intrinsically are about the truth of its subject; everything shown is assumed to be as it happened naturally without any sort of production force nudging things one way or another. There are multiple moments in Grand Theft Hamlet that seem as if they were made for the documentary rather than as a natural result of people getting frustrated with one another. For example, when Grylls and Crane have an argument over stage production and life commitments, it all happens in game, even though one of them notes that they’re, in reality, literally in different rooms in the same house arguing online.  At the same time, it was the pandemic, and things weren’t normal which probably lead to surreal moments such as this. Whatever the case, these minor sequences can leave a slightly sour taste in an entertaining story about the serendipity of finding a Shakespeare community in the online rooms of a game about robbing and stealing.

In Ghostlight, while O’Sullivan’s script is enjoyably adept at balancing obvious comedy (all of Dan’s dumbfounded reactions to the world of community theater, the various comedic-centered side characters of the troupe, etc.) and heart-wrenching sadness, there are a few moments where characters edge dangerously close to saying lines ripped from a Saturday Afternoon Special. Daisy is one character that faces this challenge, being a young teenage girl with quips for days, as well as sly observations towards her close-minded parents. It’s a testament to Katherine Mallen Kupferer that Daisy overcomes these short moments of precociousness to still turn into a captivating character by the time she and her family reach the end of their journey of moving on. For every moment that Daisy says a line that borders on “Oh, Dad!”, the actress, through body language or the slightest of vocal tweaks, reveals the character to be one that uses these snarky comments and reactions as a sort of buffer to grapple with the sadness that’s taking over their family. 

 Each film ultimately bases their final acts on not only if its main characters will pull off the Shakespeare show they’ve taken on, but also how the material shapes and molds their emotional journeys. For Dan, Romeo & Juliet gives him and his family the outlet they need to address their past tragedies. For Crane and Oosterveen, Hamlet lets them access the joys of acting that have been denied to them since the pandemic started. In each of these films, Shakespeare isn’t the solution, but it’s a needed first step for its performers to discover self-understanding and tenacity in the face of a cruel or unsteady world. 

Whatever one’s stance on The Bard’s works, it’s nice to see in 2024 new artists take this historic material and enliven it with a new angle of emotion and technological ingenuity. Sometimes that may be through the acting showcase of a family overcoming grief. Sometimes it’s in the wacky shenanigans of a bunch of people staging a play in an online game where the main goal is to blow up people with bazookas or fighter jets. Even in their noticeable differences, both of these films showcase the possibilities still to be found in the classic works of William Shakespeare.