Times are so tough that even Hamlet no longer dreams of shadows. Instead, as Riz Ahmed (Sound of Metal; Bait) says of the Prince he dreamt his whole life of playing “Hamlet is someone who is grieving the illusion that the world is a fair place.” Modern life has been crafted into a waking nightmare, and so has the latest cinematic adaptation of the greatest play ever written. Hamlet (2026) is a no-fat genre recontextualization of the melancholic Prince of Denmark into the manic-depressive son of a CEO. The hero of our times, this nepo for the people, is an excellent performance from Ahmed amid a strong feature-length debut for his previous short-film collaborator Anell Karia (The Long Goodbye; Surge). But like a steak cooked without fat, Hamlet is missing the heart of Shakespeare’s greatest work: the shared dream.
Do not mistake this for a negative review. This latest Hamlet is a paranoid genre-thriller oozing with confidence and is a good, cool movie. Shakespearean language aside, it feels more like the love child of The Fugitive (1993) and Morvern Callar (2002) than a relative to Hamnet (2026), the recent film about the meaning of Hamlet. That is a film that shakes you by the shoulders to declare with near-certainty that Hamlet is about grief.
“To be, or not to be: that is the question.”
Yet, great works strain against neat answers. Hamlet is also about anger and resistance. Romantic love, and the end of the age of monarchy. Shared dreams. Ahmed’s adaptation has tempered or removed all that sweetness that complements the bitterness of Hamlet’s resistance.
Riz Ahmed as Hamlet in HAMLET. Photo Courtesy of Vertical Entertainment.
Hamlet (2026) remains the story of a young man whose mother has decided to marry his uncle in the wake of his powerful father’s death. Where once it was the kingdom of Denmark, it is now a CEO’s family and corporation in the UK. Where once their union came through seduction, it now the South Asian practice of “protecting the orphans.” The 3-5-hour play is now a genuinely tight 1 hour and 53 minutes long, with many scenes cut or rearranged, and amalgams made of much of the cast.
The wedding that precludes the text is now the setting of the film. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Francisco and Bernardo, Marcellus and Horatio, are all collapsed into the extant Laertes, played wonderfully by perpetual brother Joe Alwyn (Hamnet; The Brutalist). Ophelia, played by Morfydd Clark (Saint Maud; Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), is now Hamlet’s wary wife, not his prospective lover. Instead of leaving for England in the middle of the 3rd of 5 acts, he returns to England at the start of the film due to the death of his father. But Hamlet still makes that famous speech.
The camera hugs Hamlet everywhere, creating a dirty, shaky frame that revels in his worry. It is well directed. But the best scene is the only one where the film leaves Hamlet’s perspective, a thing the play often does. In that text, a traveling theater group, who may or may not be Shakespeare’s own, are tasked by Hamlet with putting on a play about a king’s brother murdering him and seducing his wife, so that he may test his uncle. Recontextualized within a South Asian wedding, a group of interpretive dancers accuse Art Malik’s (True Lives; John Carter) Claudius of murder through choreography. It’s a staggering sequence with real cinematic power.
Returning back to the recent Hamnet, “To Be or Not to Be” was literalized in its typical interpretation as suicidal ideation, to the cringing chagrin of many. It is also repeated in the contextless context of a scene in the first staging of Hamlet as Jessie Buckley (Hamnet; The Bride) moves the actor and audience and theatrical viewers to tears. But she is the motor of the scene, not its fuel. The fuel is Hamnet, his mother, his father, and the crowd at the Globe Theater sharing a surreal, ghostly dream, just as the multiplex crowd is, at 24 hauntings a second.
“Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”
In the text of Hamlet, the King of Denmark first appears as a ghost to Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo. They share this ghost with Hamlet, who begins to descend into madness as he seeks to discover the truth about his father’s death. In Hamlet (2026), Hamlet sees the ghost alone, after doing a bump of cocaine off a partier’s hand. One could entirely read the ghost as a realization Hamlet can only allow himself to have and act upon in a state where his inhibitions are compromised. Indeed, for the rest of the film, his indignation transforms into manic, solitary desperation.
If you watch Riz Ahmed’s presentation “To Be or Not to Be…What is the Question?” from 2025’s Business of Fashion VOICES conference, you will discover that his idea of “To Be or Not to Be” is vastly different from that of Hamnet. “To Be or Not Be is about resistance.” All of the film’s choices are made up to convince you of that, and it is certainly how he performs it. In isolation. But Kuleshov’s effect is not isolated to montage, and the order of the scenes impacts the effect.
“Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.”
There are three main literature traditions of translating Hamlet (First Quatro, Second Quatro, and the First Folio), so it is possible that screenwriter Michael Lesslie (The Hunger Games: A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes; Macbeth) has drawn from the order of another. But in the 1938 Harvard Classics edition that sits on my shelf, Hamlet wonders aloud all the things the play is about, To Be or Not to Be. Then, from this state of emotional unrest, has a falling out with Ophelia. In this film adaptation, he has a falling out with Ophelia and, shaken by betrayal, wonders about all these things. A sequence about how our own thoughts can recklessly impact others becomes one about how isolation leads to reckless thoughts. One is about wonderings, and the other, conclusions.
When re-reading Hamlet for this review, the following passage is what moved me the most:
“Hamlet: …What’s the news?
Rosencrantz: None my lord, but that the world’s grown honest.
Hamlet: Then is doomsday near. But your news is not true. Let me question more in particular. What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of Fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?
Guildenstern: Prison, my Lord?
Hamlet: Denmark’s a prison.
Rosencrantz: Then is the world one,
Hamlet: A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.
Rosencrantz: We think not so, my lord.
Hamlet: Why, then ‘tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.
Rosencrantz: Why then, your ambition makes it one. “Tis too narrow for your mind.
Hamlet: O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
Guildenstern: Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
Hamlet: A dream itself is but a shadow.
Rosencrantz: Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.
Hamlet: Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and out-stretch’d heroes the beggar’s shadows.”
Hamlet, The Harvard Classics. Edited by Charles W. Elliot, 1910, 1938, pg. 132.
This passage is not included in such a shape in Hamlet (2026), which is an understandable tragedy. Here, he wonders with friends about the meaning of dreams, the prisons of ambition and independent thought, the circumstances of one’s birth, and the responsibility of power. It prompts us also to dwell on these ideas, and so lend the power of our own wonderings to the text and to Hamlet’s actions.
There are many revolutionary actions taken by a prince in both the text of Hamlet and the 2026 film Hamlet, but it is the wonderings of what these actions mean that gave one its staying power and the lack of which robbed the other of the revolutionary politics it sought to express. Hamlet (2026) proves the excluded Rosencrantz wrong: narrowing the focus did not free Hamlet (2026) from the cage of its own ambition, it sealed it.
In theaters April 10th, 2026.
For more information, head to the official Vertical Entertainment Hamlet website.
Final Score: 3.5 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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