Another Hamlet Retelling Gets Some Desi Tadka 

The Bard’s Hamlet gets some Riz

Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most enduring tragedy, has seen multiple adaptations over the years. Perhaps the one that is most commonly referenced among South Asians is Haider, Vishal Bharadwaj’s interpretation of the tragedy. The latest adaptation of Hamlet, on the heels of the worldwide appreciation for Hamnet (the story behind the making of Hamlet), is a Riz Ahmed-starrer film. Hamlet  premiered last year at the Telluride film festival in Colorado and got a wider theatrical distribution in the U.S. this year.
Directed by Aneil Karia and written by Michael Lesslie, the film imagines the tragedy in an elite South Asian British family. This is the second collaboration between Ahmed and Karia – they previously worked together on the Oscar-winning short film, The Long Goodbye.

Karia stays as true as possible to the play, even keeping the dialogues and names of the characters. The film begins with the death of Hamlet’s father, a real-estate billionaire, and with his uncle, Claudius (Art Malik), taking over the business and marrying Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha). Hamlet starts questioning his uncle’s intentions (and his sanity), after he is visited by his dead father’s ghost. 

It is unsettling initially to watch South Asian characters in a modern-day London mouthing long dialogues from the original Shakespeare. But as the narrative takes hold, the dialogues evoke empathy for Hamlet’s pain and loneliness as he processes his father’s murder. 

A terrific cast makes it work

Riz Ahmed gives an excellent performance as Hamlet, mirroring the character’s frustration and discomfort with much ease. Joe Alwyn as Laertes, Morfydd Clark as Ophelia and Timothy Spall as Polonius further push Hamlet towards insanity, making him question what is real and what isn’t. The famous ‘to be or not to be’ line is delivered in a car, where Karia combines Hamlet’s emotional spiral with reckless driving.

Ahmed’s layered acting and passionate dialogue delivery feels like a personal win for all South Asian artists, who have deeply benefited from the actor’s trailblazing roles in films like The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Nightcrawler and Sound of Metal. Ahmed has opened doors usually closed to South Asian actors and he continues to do so. 

Missed opportunities

While the film is supported by excellent acting, it disappoints with some loose ends. The lighting in the film is inconsistent. While some sequences, like Ahmed standing in front of a fluorescent light, look radiant and eerie, a few others inside the house fall flat because of inconsistent lighting. Chaddha’s role seems to have been written in a hurry and leaves one wondering how the film would have panned out if she had more dialogues. 

The film also ends abruptly, cutting the final scene from the original play short and leaving viewers to wonder if the film could have benefitted from a slightly longer length. It’s a missed opportunity – particularly because this film has been in the works for nearly a decade.

Now showing in theaters across the U.S.