Elsinore

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Director: Simon Stone

Cert: None

Starring: Andrew Scott, Olivia Colman, Billie Piper, Johnny Flynn, Luke Thompson, David Dawson, Matthew Beard, Joe Locke, Monica Dolan, Georgie Glen

Running Time: 1 hr 51 mins

Vulgar as it is to approach a serious work of art from the perspective of awards potential, there is no escaping the deafening Oscar buzz around Andrew Scott’s performance as Ian Charleson, dying of Aids while playing Hamlet, in this icily moving film from Simon Stone.

John Malkovich, eccentric in Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, currently looks like the only person who can beat the Dubliner to best actor in five months’ time. If the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences plays to its favourite convention, Jessie Buckley – someone else lauded for a film that circled Shakespeare’s longest play – will be the one handing out that prize. Eerie.

Elsinore, named for the setting of Hamlet, begins by placing its title over the forbidding modernist ramparts of the National Theatre on the south bank of the Thames in London. This is the castle within which the current hero will make his own accommodations with mortality. Stone briefly sketches the famous moment when Daniel Day-Lewis, the original lead of Richard Eyre’s monumental 1989 production, walks off during the opening scene. The actor never returned to that, or any other, stage.

Charleson, the Scottish performer best known as a lead in Chariots of Fire, a decade earlier, is meanwhile soldiering through a modestly successful career. “All anyone can remember is the music,” someone says (not quite fairly) of his most famous performance.

Word comes in that Eyre would like Charleson to take over from Day-Lewis, but the director does not yet know that his potential lead is living with Aids. Indeed, Charleson’s recent discovery of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a lesion characteristic of the disease, suggests a marked deterioration.

Eyre is cautiously willing to proceed. Dr Margaret Johnson (Olivia Colman), the actor’s pioneering physician, has, however, grave concerns about the stress this will put on her patient’s failing body. “I’d rather die of Hamlet than Aids,” he says later.

Stephen Beresford’s screenplay is a linear affair, moving from first reading to rehearsal to triumphant performance. Along the way the film provides a captivating, sometimes necessarily mordant portrait of gay life during the final year’s of Margaret Thatcher’s administration.

David Dawson turns up as Derek Jarman, the storied avant-garde director who cast Charleson in the punk romp Jubilee, to chastise our protagonist for not publicly announcing his diagnosis. Charleson, from a working-class background, delivers a robust response that makes irrefutable points about the UK’s stubborn social hierarchies.

All this is shot by Mike Elley in wintry shades that chime with the story’s mortal concerns. The National Theatre really does come across like a hulking medieval pile.

None of this strong work would much matter were there not a bravura performance at the film’s fraught centre. Scott, always good with the dryest irony, allows his Charleson to work humour into even the most harrowing conversations.

There are dangers here. It is asking much of an audience – even one aware that this is a true story – to believe any performance could be worth the risks this actor looks to be taking. “No one ever walked out of Hamlet saying, ‘What a short evening of light entertainment,’” Johnson says with a frown.

But Scott grasps the importance of conveying the actor’s motivation as a need rather than a desire. Again and again, the play makes bitter commentary on his situation. “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me,” Hamlet says.

It is not possible, in a motion picture, to fully convey the physical decline that accompanies death from Aids. But Scott, towards the close, allows all polite barriers to collapse as Charleson slips traumatically away.

Billie Piper offers strong support as the casting director who stays by his side. A tragically crushed Peter Mullan, as his father, does more with three or four lines than some actors have done with all Hamlet’s 4,000.

A bruising film that confirms Scott as one of the greats of our age.

Elsinore opened the 70th BFI London Film Festival. It will be in Irish cinemas from January 29th, 2027