‘Hamlet’ Review: Riz Ahmed Channels Rage in a Bold Shakespeare Adaptation

No even the most die-hard acolyte of William Shakespeare would likely have dreamt of dropping Hamlet into a nightclub, dosing him with cocaine while a track blares something like “Oye mami/Muévete, muévete.” One might, at a stretch, picture him delivering his most famous soliloquy while driving at suicidal speed—but staging it would be another matter entirely. And fewer still would have reimagined him as a real-estate magnate. Yet anything is possible in Elsinore. The play’s the thing.

In this take on the Bard’s tragedy, directed by Aneil Karia and produced by and starring Riz Ahmed, the Prince—following his father’s death—becomes the young heir to Elsinore, a property empire run by his Southeast Asian family, something like a syndicate bent on gentrifying a contested urban district. When his uncle Claudius (Art Malik) proposes to his mother Gertrude (Sheeba Chadha), it is clear he intends to seize the “throne,” even if it means clashing with the insurgent faction led by Fortinbras—displaced residents forced out so that brutal high-rises can be erected in their stead.

No, this is not parody, nor a fanciful pitch conjured after one drink too many. Karia’s Hamlet proves more faithful than its trappings suggest. The well-known events are relocated to the present and grounded in a recognisably contemporary milieu, yet the dramatic core remains intact. Crucially, so does the language: the dialogue retains its unrhymed iambic cadence—Shakespeare’s blank verse—albeit pruned, streamlined, and reconfigured into a more direct narrative spine. Characters are excised, situations condensed, but the essence endures. Put differently: cocaine, cross-dressing, or a drunken Bollywood-style dance do not strip Hamlet of his ontological identity as Hamlet.

Where the adaptation does diverge is in temperament. In Ahmed’s taut, high-voltage embodiment—and in the restless camera that shadows him—this Hamlet is less the paralysed melancholic, gnawed by doubt, than a man ablaze with purpose. From the moment a certain apparition corroborates his suspicions, vengeance is not a question but a given. What he lacks is not will but vector: unable to properly channel his fury, he commits a fatal error (those uninitiated may discover the victim themselves), and from that misdirected act the machinery of tragedy grinds into motion.

This modern, multicultural, frenetic—yes, at times almost overclocked—Hamlet does not betray the play’s thematic architecture. Transposed from the Kingdom of Denmark to a contemporary English city shaped by property speculation, the story acquires a socio-economic frame that clarifies its conflicts. The Polonius–Ophelia–Laertes triad (Timothy Spall, Morfydd Clark, Joe Alwyn) is rendered as a white family, opening a charged, if understated, racial and class dynamic within the broader struggle. Death, when it arrives, is more immediate—more corporeal, more violent—than in many statelier renditions.

It is, in the end, a compelling exercise: pared down and propulsive, yet intellectually honest and fundamentally loyal to Shakespeare’s design. Several of the canonical soliloquies remain, those apertures through which Hamlet’s interiority is made legible in language both elevated and lucid. “To be, or not to be—that is the question,” he asks here as his car barrels the wrong way down a motorway, courting annihilation head-on. “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them… To die, to sleep— / No more.”

You know the rest.