Friends, you read that right. A new film is coming to theaters in January that is… Hamlet staged in the Grand Theft Auto video game. Yes, Hamlet acted out by video game avatars, shot in-frame, and edited into its own film.
Before you wonder if something is rotten in the stage of filmmaking, or that the rest is violence, consider this…
Directed and written by Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls, and co-starring Crane and his friend Mark Oosterveen, the film, which is called Grand Theft Hamlet, is part digital narrative, part documentary. The film’s frame narrative features Crane and Oosterveen, two out-of-work actors sheltering-in-place during the COVID pandemic in January 2021, who discover that their video game pastime seems capable of not only bringing them together (and giving them a project) during isolation, but also allowing them to engage with a foundational text and their beloved craft.
The actors speak Shakespeare’s lines over the staging, in the modern, hyper-brutal world of GTA‘s Los Santos; underscoring the ways that Shakespeare’s words contain a kind of timelessness or malleability. According to critics, what ends up happening is not an attempt to make this as straight a Shakespeare production as possible, but to play with the text and the meaning of Hamlet in ways that only this new setting can unlock. Peter Bradshaw wrote, in The Guardian:
…as one of the lead players says, this is Shakespeare on a billion dollar budget, or Shakespeare as Elon Musk could afford to produce it. Crane and Oosterveen, with Pinny Grylls (who directs along with Crane), reflect absorbingly on the endless, bleak violence of the game, how close it is to the violence of Shakespeare’s world and how depressed they are due to the stasis of lockdown; it adds up to a new dreamlike insight into Hamlet’s melancholy.
…The result is wild, like Baz Luhrmann’s gangbanger Romeo + Juliet or Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which actors roam the land performing their show but suspect that no one is out there watching.
Suffice to say, I’m intrigued. There have been many, many, many Hamlets out there, but this one feels genuinely innovative. Let’s ride.
Grand Theft Hamlet is in select theaters on January 17th, 2025.
