{"id":884242,"date":"2026-09-05T11:48:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T11:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/884242\/"},"modified":"2026-09-05T11:48:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T11:48:12","slug":"elsinore-movie-review-andrew-scott-towers-over-awards-bait-cliches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/884242\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Elsinore’ Movie Review: Andrew Scott Towers Over Awards Bait Cliches"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s no question Andrew Scott<\/a>, the 49-year-old Irish actor, has earned his position as one of the finest contemporary actors going. He\u2019s in demand, but choosing wisely, and in roles that slyly play off his own status as an out gay man (a rare thing indeed) but with something off-center beneath, often a secret. He played Tom Ripley, one even more sociopathic than Matt Damon\u2019s own iconically calculating Adonis, to devastating effect in the sinister Netflix series \u201cRipley<\/a>,\u201d there more explicitly grappling with the Patricia Highsmith character\u2019s ambiguous (but was it?) sexuality. He played the Hot Priest who turned down a chance at heterosexual, secular love in \u201cFleabag,\u201d of course, and starred in \u201cAll of Us Strangers\u201d as a lonely adult orphan living in a glittering tower, bracing himself for romantic intimacy with Paul Mescal.<\/p>\n

\"'The<\/a> \"'Remember<\/a> <\/p>\n

I also saw him playing up to nine roles in Anton Chekhov\u2019s \u201cVanya\u201d onstage in New York City last year as men and women of all sorts, showing an actor who can shimmy between genders and across ranges. He has the unmistakable warmth of someone you should trust, but with intrigue behind the curtain of many of his performances to suggest that maybe you shouldn\u2019t. He\u2019s that good.<\/p>\n

Scott has now taken on what will, to this point, I suppose, go down as \u201cthe role of a lifetime\u201d in director Simon Stone\u2019s rueful, pained, and unremarkable new film<\/a> drama \u201cElsinore<\/a>\u201d as Scottish actor Ian Charleson, who died of HIV\/AIDS complications while portraying Hamlet at the National Theatre in London in 1990. Charleson\u2019s story is unlikely to be one most are familiar with. Even the most public of deaths among the most publicly gay of people often still remain in hiding, though Charleson wasn\u2019t out himself. He resisted pressures from his inner circle to announce his disease amid a stage run that miraculously lasted 24 performances. Actors then were afraid of damaging their reputations. It\u2019s not that different now, even as many advancements have made HIV\/AIDS feel locally like a plague of the past.<\/p>\n

A blond-headed Scott throws himself valiantly into the role of Charleson with the urgency and commitment of any of his best work, but the problem isn\u2019t his: It\u2019s that the movie surrounding him dulls the greatness of his performance with its conventional storytelling, and over-complication in post. \u201cElsinore\u201d is one of those movies where you can feel the filmmaker \u2014 here, Stone, known for both stage and screen \u2014 actively laboring to \u201copen up the play\u201d with the opportunities of film. But \u201cElsinore\u201d was never a play. Instead, it\u2019s a movie where every emotional beat worth lingering on, especially Charleson\u2019s swan-song performances as Hamlet, is churned into a frenzied montage of editing that won\u2019t let the material take a breath. Or the audience sink in.<\/p>\n

Charleson played an Olympian athlete in the Best Picture-winning 1981 film \u201cChariots of Fire,\u201d and an Anglican priest in the next year\u2019s Best Picture topper, \u201cGandhi.\u201d That was after playing an outr\u00e9 bisexual in the 1978 film \u201cJubilee,\u201d directed by his former lover, the very openly gay director Derek Jarman<\/a>, who died of AIDS in 1994. Aside from a handful of film credits, including one alluded to in \u201cElsinore\u201d as Dario Argento\u2019s giallo \u201cOpera,\u201d Charleson otherwise kept to the stage. Scott\u2019s Charleson at one point in this film opines about how much more satisfying stage work is for an actor without an editor there to chop you up to pieces.<\/p>\n

Stone, working from a screenplay by Stephen Beresford (himself a playwright), does not follow his protagonist\u2019s lead. Every thoughtful consideration of Kaposi\u2019s sarcoma lesions, or the retching of blood into buckets under the care of dutiful practitioner Dr. Margaret Johnson (Olivia Colman) to show the terrible realities of the disease, is whipped into what feels like a feature-length trailer. The best scenes out of the \u201cHamlet\u201d production detailed here are tossed into a rushed montage near the movie\u2019s end that gives us no sense of what we are promised is a performance of enormity. (The play in 1990 was directed by Richard Eyre, later the filmmaker behind features like the campy diva battle \u201cNotes on a Scandal<\/a>.\u201d He\u2019s played in \u201cElsinore\u201d by Johnny Flynn.)<\/p>\n

A couple of things are going on: \u201cElsinore\u201d triggers in a watchful gay viewer\u2019s senses the signifiers of what would be the AIDS awards-bait movie of serious gravitas. Tom Hanks\u2019 Oscar-winning performance in \u201cPhiladelphia.\u201d Ed Harris in \u201cThe Hours.\u201d Everyone who came out of the cringey \u201cDallas Buyers Club\u201d with Academy Awards in 2014. There are others, though more lost to time. We become suspicious of this device, especially when paired with great acting. Is HIV\/AIDS being exploited in the package of a would-be Oscar hit? Or are we showing young queer audiences how it was, how we got to where we are, and how where that is still isn\u2019t perfect? It can be both, but the structure of \u201cElsinore\u201d tips toward the former.<\/p>\n

Then, there\u2019s a veritable, cheeky who\u2019s-who of British gay literati and luminaries lingering about \u201cElsinore\u2019s\u201d 1989 London milieu that\u2019s irresistible in theory, but often drab in execution. There\u2019s Eyre, of course, and Jarman (David Dawson, as excellent and tender and wounded here as he was in his screen breakthrough \u201cMy Policeman<\/a>\u201d). The afterburn of his relationship with Charleson lingers affectingly, though. After some drinks, he invites Charleson home, but they instead part with one of those tacit kisses shared by people who once loved each other but can\u2019t make it work anymore. There\u2019s too much history here. The lingering scorches of Charleson\u2019s secret affairs and friendships with various (and out) men make for the best parts of \u201cElsinore,\u201d but there\u2019s no life to the telling.\u00a0(Joe Locke plays a young man also ailing in Johnson\u2019s AIDS clinic alongside Charleson.)<\/p>\n

The pallid grayness of Mike Eley\u2019s cinematography is probably supposed to mimic the finality of HIV\/AIDS taking hold, but there\u2019s no passion aesthetically to counterbalance what becomes absolute misery onscreen to watch. I\u2019m not in the business of comparing one gay social drama to another, but Robin Campillo\u2019s 2017 Cannes-winning French drama \u201cBeats Per Minute\u201d imbued an albeit more activist-oriented story of ACT UP fighting against AIDS suppression in Paris with such heat and spectacle. Watching someone die of AIDS in a room becomes a bore unless anyone is given a reason to keep on living.<\/p>\n

That reason is, of course, supposed to be Charleson\u2019s performance in \u201cHamlet,\u201d which is relegated to a whirlwind sequence at the movie\u2019s end after many pained rehearsals where he refused to drop out (and where Johnson encouraged him to). Scott has a mesmerizing hold on his scenes, and he\u2019s compelling to watch in his repartee with Colman as Johnson, who treated the disease at a time when it was most stigmatized. She named her groundbreaking HIV testing clinic after him; that\u2019s how much he impacted her. We are told how much Charleson mattered to people, but never shown it. Which unfortunately shuffles off \u201cElsinore,\u201d named after the Danish town where \u201cHamlet\u201d was set and where its main character died, off to the realm of HIV\/AIDS movies seeking prestige over deep feeling.<\/p>\n

Grade: C<\/p>\n

\u201cElsinore\u201d premiered at the 2026 Telluride<\/a> Film Festival. Focus Features releases it starting November 20.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s no question Andrew Scott, the 49-year-old Irish actor, has earned his position as one of the finest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":884243,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[70084,49,48,306751,75,1554,209,60913],"class_list":["post-884242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-andrew-scott","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-elsinore","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-reviews","tag-telluride"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=884242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/884243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=884242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=884242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=884242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}