Love Elizabethan-era stories about vengeful Danish princes? Then you’re in luck, because 2026 is rife with adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Hot on the heels of awards weepie Hamnet – the ‘untold’ story of the creation of Hamlet – and just ahead of Mamoru Hosoda’s anime Scarlet – a gender-flipped riff on Hamlet set in the afterlife – comes, well, Hamlet. But despite that more down-the-middle title, the Riz Ahmed-starring movie is just as distinct as its cinematic brethren, possessing the urgency and intimacy of a David Fincher thriller.
Directed by Aneil Karia (Surge) and written by Michale Leslie, it’s a Hamlet adaptation that takes some surprisingly big swings. Primary among those is the decision to shoot it with a “kind of visceral first-person energy”, according to Karia. “We made one big decision in the development process, which was: ‘What if we experience everything with Hamlet? What if you encounter every problem in real time?” And it brought this singularity and interesting ambiguity to it.”
Fresh blood
Set in contemporary London, and captured with an over-the-shoulder immediacy, it’s a film that never leaves the headspace of its spiralling central figure as his world crumbles around him following the death of his father and the news that his mother, Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha), is to marry his uncle, Claudius (Art Malik). For Ahmed, playing Hamlet was a long-held ambition.
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“I’d been trying to make this for a long time because I became obsessed with [Hamlet] when I was a teenager,” Ahmed tells GamesRadar+. “I had an English teacher who gave me this play at a time when I was really interested in rap music as well, and I found this was exactly how I felt, expressed in the most amazing lyricism ever. And it’s interesting because I often felt, like a lot of people, that I was on the outside of Shakespeare, and it didn’t really belong to people like me. But the more I looked at it, the more I realized that it had a lot of resonances with our own kind of cultural experience.”
To that end, Hamlet and his family are no longer Scandinavian royalty, but British South Asian property magnates. As Malik bluntly puts it: “Was I surprised [about] it being set within an Asian community? No. It’s about time.”
“You know, it’s a play about honor and family and who you can and can’t marry,” Ahmed adds. “And so, I was like, ‘I would love to reframe this story so that more people feel like this belongs to them and that they can see themselves in it’ because it’s just such an amazing and beautiful piece of writing. I want it to belong to everyone.”
Death becomes her
Also featuring Timothy Spall as Polonius and Joe Alwyn as Laertes (Alwyn’s Big Willy year continuing in earnest following his supporting turn in Hamnet), another major beneficiary of the film’s streamlining adaptive changes is The Rings of Power star Morfydd Clark, whose Ophelia is a combination of Hamlet’s doomed lover and his friend, Horatio.
“I loved that they did that with the Horatio lines,” Clark tells GamesRadar+. “It really modernized it, because it meant she was much more aware of what was going on. It made it more tragic for me in a way, because she’s aware and still can’t get herself out of this horrible whirlwind that’s happening around her.” Shot between seasons 2 and 3 of The Rings of Power, where Clark plays a young Galadriel, the star was also struck by how “urgent and exciting” the movie is. “It feels so frantic. I had to take a huge deep breath at the end of it because you are just so immersed.”
Noting that she came to Hamlet, like most Millennials, through Disney (“I grew up with Hamlet because of The Lion King”), Clark has a theory about the sudden influx of stories inspired by the Shakespeare classic. “All of Shakespeare is always there,” she says. “It was a story that was part of my upbringing, and I didn’t know it at the time, but it is timeless. Unfortunately, this tragedy is timeless.”
Having lived with Hamlet for decades, it’s something Ahmed has given significant thought to as well: why Hamlet, and why now?
“The world needs it right now,” Ahmed says. “Hamlet is a story about someone who is grieving the illusion of a fair world, who realizes that the world is a messed-up place that he’s powerless in the face of it, and actually he’s complicit in it. And that I think is how a lot of people are feeling in this moment. That question, which is, ‘Am I losing my mind or has the world gone crazy?’ You know, that’s what Hamlet is about. And I think that’s what we’re living through at this moment.”
Hamlet releases in UK cinemas on February 6 and in US theaters on April 10. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.
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