{"id":774229,"date":"2026-09-18T02:08:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T02:08:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/774229\/"},"modified":"2026-09-18T02:08:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T02:08:15","slug":"tiff-has-given-us-a-major-new-oscar-contender-it-is-once-again-about-hamlet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/774229\/","title":{"rendered":"TIFF has given us a major new Oscar contender. It is once again about Hamlet."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

For the second year in a row, the Toronto International Film Festival\u2019s audience prize might go to a movie about putting on Hamlet.<\/p>\n

Last year, of course, the People\u2019s Choice Award\u2014a reliable, if not infallible, bellwether of a Best Picture nomination\u2014was Hamnet<\/a>, which doubled down on Shakespeare\u2019s greatest fictional tragedy by fusing it with the real-life death of his 11-year-old son<\/a>. This year, the movie that had TIFF-goers sniffling in their seats is Elsinore, starring Andrew Scott as actor Ian Charleson, who took the lead in a National Theatre production of Hamlet mere weeks before he died of AIDS-related complications.<\/p>\n

Building a tragedy around Hamlet is arguably the dramatic equivalent of starting on third base, but Elsinore doesn\u2019t simply pop in a few lines of Shakespeare when it runs short on poetry. While Hamnet thrives on the parallels between the play and the grief that, at least in theory, inspired it<\/a>, Elsinore drives at an unstated irony: Hamlet is about a man who wants to die, and the movie is about a man who is determined to live.<\/p>\n

Although Charleson played one of the leads in the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire and a supporting role in Gandhi<\/a>, which won Best Picture the following year, he never quite became a movie star, and by 1989, when Elsinore picks up the story, he\u2019s openly envious of the meteoric rise of Daniel Day-Lewis, whose forthcoming Hamlet is already the talk of the town. But when Day-Lewis abruptly walks offstage in the middle of the performance\u2014as legend has it, because he saw the ghost of his own father onstage<\/a>\u2014there\u2019s a sudden opening, and director Richard Eyre (Johnny Flynn) wants Ian to fill the part. Ian, however, has just discovered his first Kaposi\u2019s sarcoma, and his doctor (Olivia Colman) suggests it would be wiser to put all his energies into fighting the disease rather than taking on a four-hour play that climaxes with a swordfight. He can play the role of a lifetime, or he can prolong his own life. And, as he tells her, \u201cI\u2019d rather die of Hamlet than AIDS.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Claire McNear
\n One of Jeopardy\u2019s Most Beloved Traditions Vanished. I Spent Months Talking to the People Whose Lives It Changed. Then I Got Some News.
\n Read More\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The movie, directed by Simon Stone and written by Stephen Beresford, touches on Hamlet\u2019s greatest hits: There\u2019s Yorick, the nunnery, and eventually some \u201cTo be or not to be.\u201d But it also circles back again and again to a line that doesn\u2019t usually get as much attention: \u201cRemember me.\u201d Originally spoken by the ghost of Hamlet\u2019s father and repeated by his son, it becomes Elsinore\u2019s refrain, not just for Charleson but for the era he represents, when even the most enlightened clinics still burned the bedding after a patient died of AIDS and coming out of the closet could be a career-killer. Charleson, whose sexual orientation was not made public until after his death, is heavily criticized by the pioneering gay director Derek Jarman (David Dawson) for putting his Hollywood aspirations above the fate of his community. (The fact that Charleson apparently left his part in Jarman\u2019s Jubilee off his r\u00e9sum\u00e9 adds salt to the wound.) At the film\u2019s Toronto premiere, Beresford admitted that after the two men\u2019s friendship ended over Charleson\u2019s decision to stay closeted, they never spoke again. But he invented an arc for them that plays out across several scenes and becomes the spine of the movie, two gay men living with AIDS who choose different paths and find a way to reconcile, although that arc has far more to do with the politics of 2026 than the way Jarman actually felt.<\/p>\n


\n This Content is Available for Slate Plus members only<\/p>\n

The Daily Wire Decided to Make a Die Hard\u2013esque Movie About Campus Protest. It Is Every Bit As Deranged As You Might Think.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n


\n This Content is Available for Slate Plus members only<\/p>\n

A Major New Oscar Contender Has Arrived. It Is Once Again About \u2026 Putting on Hamlet.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Based on the lengthy ovation that greeted Scott when he returned to the stage after Elsinore\u2019s screening, he\u2019s a lock for a Best Actor nomination, but he doesn\u2019t make Charleson into the kind of tortured, regretful gay man the Oscars tend to favor, especially when the character is played by a straight actor. The dying actor never blames himself for getting HIV or rages against the heavens at the cruelty of his fate, but neither does he accept the trade-off of prolonging his life by diminishing it, whether that means accepting the side effects of AZT, which he derides as a failed cancer drug, or withdrawing from the rigors of doing eight shows a week. Instead, he chooses to make what may be his final mark on the world, prepared for what comes next, because, as Hamlet himself puts it, the readiness is all.<\/p>\n

As a young stage actor, Scott drew comparisons to Charleson and played a lauded Hamlet of his own in 2017. But in Elsinore, he reimagines the role through Charleson\u2019s eyes, and the movie dwells on the moments when Hamlet works through his fear of death and comes out the other side. Stone gives us few prolonged moments from the play, using the rehearsal process to jump through the text and ending the film with an extended montage that freely intermixes Charleson\u2019s life and his art. Some may regard the rush of images and Stefan Gregory\u2019s swelling score as heavy-handed, but the sequence opens the floodgates as intended and brings us to the moment when Hamlet realizes that the uncertainty he feared above all has been pierced; he sees his own death with clarity and, at least in this telling, to a peace beyond it. The rest is silence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":774230,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[22168,6491,96,1293,9138,2839,16120,15001,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-774229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-aids","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-history","tag-lgbtq","tag-movies","tag-the-oscars","tag-theater","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774229","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=774229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/774230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=774229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=774229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=774229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}