TIFF '25: Hamlet

Debut director Aneil Karia’s Hamlet is one of two Shakespearean films at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, bringing the play in its original Early Modern English to contemporary London. Karia hews the story down to its base components, leaving characters like Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern aside in favor of a closer look at Hamlet himself—but despite a disarmingly excellent performance from Riz Ahmed as the titular character, weak worldbuilding and scant characterization makes for a hollow interpretation of the story.

In place of castles and kingdoms, Karia gives us Succession levels of corporate intrigue: Elsinore is now a sprawling real estate development company, the throne replaced by the C-suite and the foreign threats to power coming from tenants displaced to homeless encampments. This updated royal family is South Asian, and Hamlet returns home after a long absence to perform Hindu funeral rites for his father, Elsinore’s erstwhile CEO. The basic beats of the play are followed: that same day, Hamlet’s uncle Claudius (Art Malik) announces his intention to marry his brother’s wife, Hamlet’s mother Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha). Grieving, distressed, and visited by the ghost of his father, Hamlet sets off on a quest of revenge. 

Ahmed is a force onscreen, making 17th-century dialogue legible through raised eyebrows, ironic grins and a kind of manic physical energy that grows as his character falls deeper into a mire of conspiracy. His performance is complemented by the surrounding cast, yet the overarching focus on his Hamlet is often to the detriment of the other characters. We only see the other characters through Hamlet’s eyes, making their motivations opaque. Malik’s Claudius is alternately the affable uncle and sinister schemer, while Polonius (Timothy Spall, as ratlike as his portrayal of Peter Pettigrew) is sketched broadly as Claudius’s right-hand man with possibly underhanded intentions. We see Morfydd Clark’s Ophelia at first as Hamlet’s old friend and confidante, and later as collateral damage in Hamlet’s paranoid investigation as he verbally humiliates her at his mother and uncle’s wedding. Clark in particular feels underused in an already thinly written character, which is disappointing as she does much with the little she’s given. 

That superficiality extends to the worldbuilding—or lack thereof—in the modernized setting. Hamlet’s London is given a gritty, noirish tint from cinematographer Stuart Bentley, and there’s beauty in the South Asian twists Karia adds, like the dance given at the wedding in place of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s play. But where directors like Baz Luhrmann and Akira Kurosawa have transposed Shakespeare’s words into worlds with playful references and colorful cultural renditions, Karia is content to render Hamlet’s world with Elsinore-branded construction sites graffitied with the word “rotten” (as in, there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark) and heavy-handed news headlines about Elsinore displacing the homeless encampment known as “Fortinbras.” These little references are barely enough to sustain the weight and context of the play or elevate its drama to contemporary class considerations. 

Though buoyed by strong performances and a sustained sense of tension, Karia’s hollowed-out adaptation struggles under the weight of its legacy. This Hamlet might bring the story to new and younger audiences, but it’s unlikely to stand the test of time.

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