{"id":517945,"date":"2026-04-07T16:56:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T16:56:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/517945\/"},"modified":"2026-04-07T16:56:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T16:56:15","slug":"shaky-cam-shakespeare-rattles-the-bard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/517945\/","title":{"rendered":"Shaky-cam Shakespeare rattles the Bard"},"content":{"rendered":"

Few stories have been adapted as often as one of William Shakespeare\u2019s plays. So, if you\u2019re going to take a stab at Hamlet, you better bring something fresh to the table<\/a> to stand out against the number of productions over cinema\u2019s history. In this regard, director Aneil Karia\u2019s adaptation does both too much and too little. His version transports the tortured prince to modern-day London\u2019s South Asian community, which gives it a unique twist. However, the appeal stops there as soon as you realize this modern update also includes a shaky camera and so much editing that it distracts from the performances. Even star Riz Ahmed isn\u2019t immune from the modern stylistic choices, as his intense performance is lost in the sea of poor filmmaking choices.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Karia\u2019s Hamlet, Ahmed plays the grieving son of a recently departed real estate mogul. As the family gathers at the funeral reception, his mother Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha) and uncle Claudius (Art Malik) announce their hasty marriage, and it sends the young man spiraling. He follows his friend Laertes (Joe Alwyn) to the club, where after a few drinks and a bump of coke, he\u2019s visited by his father\u2019s ghost, who tells him the truth about his murder and how he must avenge him. Hamlet launches a plan for justice, but his plan goes awry and more blood is spilt.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Karia, who previously worked with Ahmed on their Oscar-winning short <\/a>The Long Goodbye<\/a>, doesn\u2019t have a clear vision of what this new Hamlet should look like. The handheld camera tries to inject physical intensity when words are doing all the work, giving the feature a sloppy style. At one point during an intimate conversation between Hamlet and Ophelia (Morfydd Clark), the camera is so unsteady, her head nearly hits all four corners of the screen. There are also inexplicable zooms, drone-shot pan outs, and choppy cuts diluting the intensity of the performances. A few scenes shine through the messy cinematography, like the doomed wedding sequence, but even that feels rushed and truncated, rapidly intercutting reaction shots of each character between the dancers performing the play that Hamlet requests of his father\u2019s murder. Cinematographer Stuart Bentley, who previously shot the romantic drama We Live In Time<\/a>, is capable of thoughtful compositions and camera movements, which means this aesthetic was a purposeful, miscalculated attempt at looking hip, fast, and unencumbered by the proscenium bonds of its predecessors. Yet, even YouTubers and TikTokers understand the power of a tripod.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When the movie begins with Hamlet\u2019s father\u2019s funeral, the grief-stricken son is performing traditional funerary rites with other male members of his family, hinting that this version of the Bard\u2019s play would do more to explore the immigrant experience in England. But that quickly falls by the wayside\u2014although we do have plenty of intra-family strife. In that department, Hamlet has never let us down. Adapted for the screen by Michael Lesslie, this Hamlet pares back certain lines while shoehorning in extra details to modernize the text without changing it drastically. The cultural specificity is really only brought up again when Elsinore, now the name of a housing development, is revealed to be a questionable project that\u2019s displaced people. Once again, that change is waved off screen almost as quickly as it\u2019s brought on. These trims also lose some of the side characters\u2019 motives and descents into madness, most notably Ophelia, which makes the overall narrative more confusing and gives the actors less to do. She spends much of her time looking annoyed and somewhat concerned about her boyfriend\u2019s outburst at the wedding, but nothing more, so her fatal trek to a watery grave is more of a logical jump than the next tragedy in a long line of death.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ahmed\u2019s performance somewhat salvages this version of Hamlet from being a complete flop. It\u2019s a subtle interpretation for the screen, one meant for close-ups to capture his face as he winces when learning of his mother and uncle\u2019s nuptials or his boyish annoyance of Ophelia, which is mostly conveyed in whispered dialogue and stern looks. But Karia\u2019s commitment to turning his Hamlet into a sloppy Michael Bay knockoff makes it impossible to fully appreciate Ahmed\u2019s work. His delivery of \u201cTo be or not to be\u201d takes place as he\u2019s recklessly driving a sports car, but the scene looks weirdly stiff, shot from the passenger window as he\u2019s staring ahead grumbling to himself. It\u2019s an anticlimactic performance of one of the most important soliloquies in the English language, and it certainly doesn\u2019t help the source material look any younger. As Polonius, Timothy Spall is really the only one to match Ahmed\u2019s intensity, and Chaddha holds a few great moments on her own, but their scenes with Ahmed are too brief to inject any real tension. Unfortunately, Ahmed is really the only one who gets to shine in the cast.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are some interesting concepts in this version of Hamlet that go unexplored, and at least a few performances that would have been better served if the camera could stop inducing motion sickness. But Karia is too checked out, too uninterested at seeing the film\u2019s new ideas through, and too committed to using understated performances that barely register on a screen that looks like it\u2019s all on a swaying ship. The play\u2019s the thing, but only if we can see it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Director: Aneil Karia
Writer: Michael Lesslie
Starring: Riz Ahmed, Art Malik, Sheeba Chaddha, Joe Alwyn, Morfyyd Clark, Timothy Spall
Release Date: April 10, 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Few stories have been adapted as often as one of William Shakespeare\u2019s plays. So, if you\u2019re going to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":517946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-517945","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=517945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/517946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=517945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=517945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=517945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}