Riz Ahmed, the fine British actor and musician, is stunning as Hamlet in Aneil Karia’s bold and vivid adaptation of Hamlet, one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies. The film, a British film in English and Hindi/Punjabi, with a significantly South Asian/diaspora team — Riz Ahmed, Art Malik as the uncle Claudius, Sheba Chaddha as his mother Gertrude, and director Aneil Karia, was in the Centrepiece section at the recent 50th Toronto International Film Festival. It was also at the Telluride film festival, and will be at the BFI London Film Festival from October 8-19. Of course, the beloved play has a long history of film adaptations, among my most favourite being Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet in Russian (b/w, 1964), and Vishal Bhardwaj’s brilliant adaptation Haider, with Shahid Kapoor, Irrfan Khan, Tabu and Kay Kay Menon, set in Kashmir, with a screenplay by Basharat Peer and Vishal Bhardwaj, in 2014. 

The story is well known to many from school days: Hamlet’s father has passed away; his mother Gertrude is marrying his uncle Claudius in unseemly haste. Hamlet is wounded and outraged, and after his father appears as a ghost (Avijit Dutt) and tells him Claudius murdered him, he is further enraged. He stages a play that makes it clear to Claudius that Hamlet knows he’s the culprit. There is the famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be…” and his lover Ophelia, and by the climax, the body count is very, very high.