Film Review of the Week

Drama

Hamlet (15)

Review: Riz Ahmed reunites with director Aneil Karia, five years after they collaborated on an Oscar-winning short film to complement the actor’s concept album The Long Goodbye, for a contemporary reimagining of Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy. This pared-down Hamlet reduces The Bard’s poetic text to under two hours and stokes murderous intent within a prosperous South Asian community responsible for altering London’s skyline with towering constructions.

Hamlet (Ahmed) returns to England to mourn his father (Avijit Dutt), the CEO of Elsinore Property who has died at the age of 77. The shell-shocked son learns plans are already afoot for his uncle Claudius (Art Malik) to marry his mother Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha). “Cast your mourning colour off and let your eye look like a friend on Uncle,” solemnly implores the bride-to-be just days after losing her husband. “All that lives must die.” In private Hamlet laments the “most wicked speed” of this announcement and he numbs his grief with booze and drugs at a nightclub before stumbling uneasily into the street and glimpsing his father’s ghost.

Atop one of the company’s apartment blocks under development, Hamlet learns the shocking truth: “The sickness that did sting your father’s life now wears his crown.” The murdered CEO urges revenge and fashions Hamlet as the instrument of his retribution. The son initially seeks out Ophelia (Morfydd Clark) to share the spectral encounter then sets about plotting a fitting revenge with the help of a dancer, who is set to perform at the wedding. However, Hamlet’s “excellent good friend” Laertes (Joe Alwyn) and Ophelia’s father Polonius (Timothy Spall) intrude upon his spiralling grief.

Hamlet is an elegant distillation of Shakespeare’s text which relinquishes some of the stage version’s memorable moments to focus attention on Ahmed’s vengeful son as he mentally unravels in close-up. Plotting remains credible to a modern-day setting. Screenwriter Michael Lesslie’s dialogue retains the essence of the iambic pentameter and Ahmed is magnificent navigating soliloquies in hushed tones as he debates back and forth with himself about kin poisoning and manipulating kin in pursuit of power and influence.

Handheld camerawork frequently mirrors the title character’s jitters as a supposedly righteous plan comes together to stage a performance at the wedding that will publicly expose Claudius’s guilt. Despite Clark’s sterling work, Ophelia makes less impact here and Karia wrongfoots Shakespeare purists in the film’s foreboding closing act by heaping tragedy in unexpected directions. To be or not to be slavishly faithful to the source material, that is not the question.

Horror

Send Help (15)

Review: Trouble in paradise unleashes satisfying spurts of blood and gore as Evil Dead director Sam Raimi returns to the horror genre in a hilariously unhinged survival thriller written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift. Rachel McAdams embraces the ungainly physicality and spiralling delirium of her reluctant anti-heroine, who turns the tables on bullying work colleagues in the most satisfyingly overblown and garish fashion.

Socially awkward savant Linda Liddle (McAdams) is a lynchpin of the Planning & Strategy Department at Preston Strategic Solutions – a brilliant mind with a toe-curling inability to read a room, who is long overdue a promotion to executive level as a reward for years of dedicated service. When the current CEO dies, his flashy son Bradley (Dylan O’Brien) bullishly takes charge of the company and denies Linda a seat at the top table in favour of chauvinistic newcomer Donovan (Xavier Samuel). The boys’ club repeatedly bullies and belittles Linda, and takes credit for her hard work, but she has the last laugh when the company’s private jet crashes en route to an important meeting in Thailand.

While most of the office ‘bros’ perish in the disaster (brilliantly realised with actors being sucked out of their seats), Linda escapes the water-filled fuselage and calls upon her survival skills, honed by watching her favourite reality TV series, to build a shelter, collect rainwater and hunt a wild boar. Her resourcefulness in the face of adversity proves invaluable to keeping Bradley – the only other survivor – alive on an isolated island. As days pass, tension escalates between Linda and Bradley with ghoulish and catastrophic consequences. Meanwhile, the CEO’s glamorous girlfriend Zuri (Edyll Ismail) leads the search for her missing beau, convinced he is still alive.

Send Help doesn’t need any assistance to delight and disgust, often in quick succession, galvanised by scintillating on-screen rivalry between McAdams and O’Brien, who kick sand in the face of political correctness to play out their battle of the sexes in grand flourishes. McAdams plumbs the darkest depths of her frumpy character’s twisted psyche in sun-kissed, tropical surroundings. Screenwriters Shannon and Swift gift-wrap her some truly jaw-dropping interludes and she fully embraces the escalating madness without a hint of vanity.

Two wince-inducing scenes of bloodshed, realised with a blitzkrieg of physical effects and digital trickery, had me rocking back and forth in my seat with uncontrolled hysterics. The head-on collision of ghoulish giggles and close-up carnage is reminiscent of Raimi’s wickedly entertaining early instalments of the Evil Dead franchise. The constantly shifting balance of power between Linda and Bradley tees up wonderfully warped mind games and it’s difficult to second guess who might emerge victorious as morality is skewered and roasted over an open fire.