{"id":776668,"date":"2026-09-20T09:50:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-20T09:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/776668\/"},"modified":"2026-09-20T09:50:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T09:50:11","slug":"elsinore-film-review-to-be-however-briefly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/776668\/","title":{"rendered":"Elsinore Film Review: To Be, However Briefly"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Elsinore, Andrew Scott gives the performance of his career as Ian Charleson, the actor who played Hamlet while dying of AIDS.<\/p>\n

Director: Simon Stone
Genre: Biographical, Drama
Run Time: 111\u2032
TIFF Screening: September 14, 2026
U.S. Release: December 2026
U.K. & Ireland Release: January 29, 2027<\/p>\n

London, 1989. Ian Charleson (Andrew Scott, of All of Us Strangers<\/a>) is a gifted stage and screen actor known worldwide from Chariots of Fire. He\u2019s bored by what he\u2019s being offered. Then, when Daniel Day-Lewis walks off stage mid-performance of the National Theatre\u2019s production of Hamlet, forcing it to suspend production, director Richard Eyre asks Charleson to take over.<\/p>\n

He takes it, even while he\u2019s dying of AIDS, and against the advice of Dr. Margaret Johnson (Olivia Colman, of Wicked Little Letters<\/a>), who tells him straight away that the run will shorten what\u2019s left. He does it anyway, and gives twenty-four now-historic performances.<\/p>\n

Scott has played Hamlet himself in around 150 West End performances. He\u2019s called it an Olympian task, and that knowledge gives his work here an unusual precision. He dropped real weight for the role, and the frailty is right there on him. The engine underneath never dims. He\u2019s said he had to unlearn his Hamlet in order to perform Charleson\u2019s. There are layers everywhere. David Rintoul, Charleson\u2019s actual best friend, plays the actor playing the Ghost of Hamlet\u2018s father. It could feel like a stunt, but it never does. Elsinore keeps finding ways for Shakespeare\u2019s meditation on mortality and legacy to mirror the life happening around it.<\/p>\n

Stephen Beresford\u2019s script does something I didn\u2019t see coming. He builds an AIDS story in the shape of a sports movie. Montages, training, a clock, a crowd. On paper that should be tasteless. In the theater it\u2019s what keeps the film from becoming two hours of grief.<\/p>\n

The supporting cast is stacked. Billie Piper plays Patsy Pollock, the casting director and best friend who hands him his pain medication with one hand and shoves him out the door to rehearsal with the other. May we all get one of those friends in our lives. Colman gives Dr. Johnson an icy professionalism that thaws, and she\u2019s in top form. Johnny Flynn plays Richard Eyre, the director facing an impossible call about his friend. Juliet Stevenson knew the real Charleson, and it shows.<\/p>\n

\"AndrewAndrew Scott in Elsinore (Courtesy of TIFF)<\/p>\n

What got me most is how funny Elsinore is, and I found that I cried easily at the light parts. There\u2019s a stretch where Charleson pushes a younger patient, Nicholas (Joe Locke, of Heartstopper<\/a>), to choreograph a dance for the ward. They do it to an Ethel Merman disco version of \u201cThere\u2019s No Business Like Show Business.\u201d It\u2019s ridiculous, and it\u2019s one of the best scenes in the film. The laughter doesn\u2019t soften what\u2019s happening. It makes the people living through it feel more alive.<\/p>\n

Cinematographer Mike Eley shoots handheld, on his shoulder or an Easyrig. Helen Scott\u2019s design builds 1989 London without the eighties costume party. The National looms over Charleson like the film\u2019s own Elsinore castle, enormous and cold. Charleson\u2019s body keeps getting smaller. Then he performs, and the scale flips. The man fills the place, and Scott masterfully sketches that out for us with increasingly desperate soliloquies written hundreds of years ago that eerily mirror the fear many faced then and are still fighting now.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where it gets past the tragic biopic. It\u2019s about what an artist leaves behind when the body carrying the art is running out of time. Charleson lived through the AIDS crisis while so many queer lives were lost, hidden or misread. The film gives him what history usually denies people who die young: He\u2019s remembered for the life he lived, not the way it ended.<\/p>\n

By tradition, actors at the National bang on the dressing-room windows for a peer who\u2019s finished a run. The producers filled those windows with people who knew Charleson and actors who\u2019ve won the award named for him. Elsinore asks nothing of you except that you sit in the house and observe. When Scott steps into the light, you stop watching a man die and start seeing an actor live as hard as he can, for as long as he can. A thousand people in Toronto stood and stayed standing long enough to say the room agreed.<\/p>\n

Elsinore (Tiff 2026): Movie Plot & Recap<\/p>\n

Synopsis:<\/p>\n

In 1989 London, a gifted actor dying of AIDS takes the title role in Hamlet at the National Theatre, knowing the run will cost him time he does not have.<\/p>\n

Pros:<\/p>\n

Andrew Scott gives a career performance, and the ovation in the room was earned<\/p>\n

A stacked bench where Piper, Colman, Flynn, Stevenson and Mullan all land<\/p>\n

Framing an AIDS story like a sports movie should not work, and it completely does<\/p>\n

Cons:<\/p>\n

Not an easy watch, and it never softens where it\u2019s heading<\/p>\n

The understudies who covered Charleson\u2019s missed nights go unexplored, and that\u2019s a story too<\/p>\n

A couple of montages lean hard on the underdog framework<\/p>\n

Elsinore was screened at TIFF<\/a> on September 14, 2026. The film will be released in US theatres in December 2026 and in UK & Irish cinemas on January 29, 2027.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Elsinore, Andrew Scott gives the performance of his career as Ian Charleson, the actor who played Hamlet…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":776669,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-776668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776668","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=776668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776668\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/776669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}