The wasted potenital of Riz Ahmed’s ‘Hamlet’

This 2025 adaptation of Hamlet struggles to commit to a core identity. Micheal Leslie’s screenplay is a faulty foundation. It plays everything safe and is unsure if it wants to radically reinterpret the text or keep a faithful approach. The result is a film that doesn’t work as a faithful adaptation (a la Kenneth Brannagh), nor does it work as a re-examination of the source material (a la Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider from 2014). The lack of risks taken feels alarming and deviations from the original text are not used to enrich or further explore the themes presented. 

The film opens on the uncertain gaze of a son looking at his father’s corpse. As the funeral unfolds we are introduced to our “reimagined” Shakespearean characters. The titular Hamlet (Riz Ahmed) is on an uneasy spiral, sensing the imminent betrayal of his father’s confidants, Uncle Claudius (Art Malick), Laertes (Joe Alwyn) and Polonius (Timothy Spall). He is the only one mourning his father—even his mother Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha) is not grieving. All he has is the support of Ophelia (Morfydd Clark), the woman he loves. Mere days after the funeral, his uncle and mother announce their imminent marriage. Leaving Hamlet in a desperate bid to avenge his father, as he launches a war against Elsinore, his father’s construction kingdom, now under the rule of his scheming uncle. 

In the modern London setting, Elsinore is now a business. Our characters go clubbing, drive BMWs and wear designer suits. Frustratingly, the dialogue is not similarly modernized, choosing to stick with the text’s Shakespearean English lexicon. The few exceptions the film makes to adjust its dialogue to the modern British Asian context are when Hamlet’s father appears to him on a rooftop speaking Hindi, and the inconsistent usage of modern slang. These minimal changes feel so far and few between that they become anomalies. This indecisiveness permeates into every element of the film. 

Our core family is South Asian but retains the Danish names of Shakespeare’s original characters, a choice which confuses more than it enriches. This insistence on keeping the names the same is indicative of an issue that plagues the whole film: an unwillingness to commit to the new setting and contemporary context. In a city like London, which is home to many historic South Asian communities (our mayor is a Pakistani British Muslim who attended the film’s UK premiere at the London Film Festival), an intergenerational power struggle over the family business is a quintessential feature of the South Asian diasporic experience. Yet, this adaptation fails to meaningfully explore these ideas, holding it back from having a distinct voice. 

Despite being produced and conceived by Ahmed, this Hamlet adaptation feels like an outlier within the Oscar winner’s filmography. As his projects typically don’t shy away from tackling harder issues within the culture, the choice to entirely ignore these elements rings as inauthentic to the artistic voice he has curated.The Hindu iconography feels like hollow window dressing, an aesthetic afterthought and empty attempt at representation. 

The midpoint wedding sequence in the film is by far the strongest chapter, finally leaning into its cultural identity. Hamlet puts on a play performed through Indian traditional dance and the film transforms for a moment into what it could have been: a bold and energetic retelling through a British Asian lens, set in London. The colors pop, the music flourishes, and Akram Khan’s choreography is fantastic. This sequence feels classically Shakespearean while maintaining its own unique identity, never compromising on either. This sequence was electrifying to see but left me questioning why the whole film wasn’t operating on this level.

The film is shot in a claustrophobic faux vérité style. A tiresome majority of the shots are whispery tights of our underutilized ensemble. The performances are done a disservice, rarely allowing the actors to perform with their whole bodies, certainly a far cry from the theatrical experience that audiences of this story have enjoyed for centuries.

The uncertainty in the first image permeates throughout the film. The tepid approach gives us an unsatisfying reimagining, too afraid to explore the potential of its modern setting. Hell bent on undoing itself on a textual and formal level, it delivers a half-hearted experience that left me bitter at the wasted potential of what could’ve been.