HAMLET (in theatres)

Shakespeare is pulsating throughout the present day in filmdom; proof in last year’s stunningly heart-wrenching movie “Hamnet” earning Jesse Buckley an academy award for playing Will’s wife. The ubiquity of Shakespeare’s enticing appeal throbs through modernity: Kenneth Branagh’s acuity gifted audiences in 1993’s  “Much Ado About Nothing” & 1996’s “Hamlet”; 1996’s “Romeo & Juliet” directed by Baz Luhrmann; a favored of Peneflix “The Tragedy of Macbeth” (2021) starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand directed by Joel Coen.

Now vibrating on screens universally is director Aneil Karia’s “Hamlet” a marvelous, psychologically tantalizing, contemporary version starring the incomparable actor Riz Ahmed (Academy Award for Short Film “The Long Goodbye” also directed by Karia); he was nominated for Best Actor for the excellent “Sound of Metal” (2021). His “Hamlet” is devastatingly astute;  a scion of a South Asian family in London’s  real estate realm, he is hauntingly unnerved by his father’s death and the precipitous marriage of his widowed mother “Gertrude” (Sheeba Chadha, profoundly affecting) to his father’s brother, “Claudius” (Art Malik, charmingly, cunningly nefarious); a vision is the catalyst for revenge and the deterioration of his relationship with “Ophilia” (Morfydd Clark is stunningly spectacular). The film neatly follows the scripted scenario; but it is Ahmed’s polarizing depiction, stark journey into madness as his “to be or not to be” in a life-cauterizing automobile makes all the sense in the world. He is dynamite, bleeding with an intensity, rendering viewers awestruck with wonderment.

Alas, I watched this film on opening day, alone and totally isolated in a major theatre.

FOUR STARS!!!!

Peneflix