There couldn’t be a extra mismatched pair of topics than Shakespearean tragedy and rocket launchers fired at police choppers by males in foolish hats. Nevertheless, Grand Theft Hamlet explores this distinctive mixture of previous and current whereas revealing new and sudden narrative layers at each flip. The animated documentary follows two actors’ ill-advised makes an attempt to stage a full-length manufacturing of Hamlet in a online game world; the result’s riotously humorous and surprisingly transferring.
The winner of this 12 months’s SXSW Grand Jury Award within the Documentary Characteristic class — disclosure: This critic was one of many jurists — Grand Theft Hamlet additionally occurs to be a COVID lockdown piece, one which captures the absurdity of isolation in a method few current films have. It’s as a lot a narrative about video video games as it’s about neighborhood and discovering new avenues of emotional connection, and it runs the emotional gamut whereas exploring these concepts.
A singular synthesis of kind, it creatively tackles the subject of creative frustrations whereas reflecting on mortality within the silliest attainable methods. It’s considerate and brash in equal measure, and by the top of its mere 89 minutes — brevity is the soul of wit, in any case — the film works regardless of all odds, proving to be an entire and utter blast.
What’s Grand Theft Hamlet about?
The movie begins as a run-of-the-mill “Let’s Play” — i.e., footage introduced from inside the sport whereas different folks play it — specializing in a pair of informal avid gamers passing the time by committing violent crimes and evading the police, as is inspired in Grand Theft Auto. As a lot as watching different folks play video video games has develop into a streaming cottage trade, it could not appear to be essentially the most attention-grabbing approach to make a function movie. Nevertheless, Grand Theft Hamlet rapidly dispels this notion.
The idea behind the film is ludicrous at its core, harkening again to the times of Crimson vs. Blue, the favored (and nonetheless ongoing) sci-fi internet collection that started in 2003 and is animated fully on the planet of first-person-shooter Halo. Nevertheless, Grand Theft Hamlet’s attraction is hardly restricted to the hardcore gaming crowd. Its preliminary footage serves to introduce non-gamers to the goofy hyper-violence of Grand Theft Auto, as a pair of vigorous, out-of-work English stage actors, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen — fellows of infinite jest — come across an amphitheater inside the sport (the “Vinewood Bowl,” modeled off the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles). Earlier than lengthy, inspiration strikes, they usually resolve to see what it might take to stage a complete manufacturing of Hamlet inside this shared on-line metaverse.
What appears, at first, like a disposable YouTube sketch turns into rapidly participating, because the film begins chronicling its topics’ makes an attempt to carry auditions and rehearsal inside Grand Theft Auto On-line (the MMORPG part of Grand Theft Auto V; emphasis on “RPG”). All of the footage featured within the film is captured inside the sport itself. Shot from a mess of angles that swing round freely, untethered from bodily house, the movie is co-directed by Crane and his romantic companion, the filmmaker Pinny Grylls, who not solely features as observer and digital archivist, however enters the sport as a personality alongside Crane and Oosterveen. Finally, she turns into one of many film’s predominant topics herself.
After the main duo places out quite a few calls on digital message boards, they lastly discover a handful of potential collaborators — whether or not different keen performers, novice avid gamers seeking to maintain busy throughout lockdown, or curious onlookers who don’t fairly perceive what they’re making an attempt, however go together with it anyway. The straightforward job of staging a efficiency and drawing viewers and individuals proves hilariously troublesome, given the character of the sport. As they collect fellow actors inside this digital house, with each performing soliloquies over headsets as their avatars repeat a collection of restricted gestures, in-world cops and different on-line gamers usually disrupt Crane and Oosterveen’s peaceable gatherings. Grand Theft Auto is an inherently hedonistic world, and there’s nothing stopping some random third occasion from displaying up, guns-a-blazing (or fists-a-swinging) only for the fun of it. These frequent interruptions result in resigned sighs from the unintentional Rosencrantz and Guildenstern pairing every time they die and must respawn in some inconvenient, far-flung location earlier than making their method again to the digital stage.
It’s Theater Camp meets Punisher: Struggle Zone, a weird, farcical mix of good-natured creativity and cartoonish hyper-violence that locations quite a lot of distinctive logistical roadblocks within the actors’ paths.
Grand Theft Hamlet is a really distinctive lockdown movie.
Shot principally in early 2021, as London was present process its third main COVID lockdown, Grand Theft Hamlet traces the evolution of its central idea from a product of boredom to a honest and sprawling ardour undertaking. Over a number of months, the resultant makes an attempt and misfires to stage this manufacturing take more and more irritating types, not solely due to the in-world logistics — how do you craft a peaceable neighborhood expertise in an area devoted to bullets and bombs? — but additionally attributable to real-world logistics.
Mashable Prime Tales
Anybody with even minimal highschool stage expertise will doubtless acknowledge the issues therein, and the methods through which Crane and Oosterveen — disembodied voices emanating from the mouths of digital avatars — politely navigate every drawback. From turning down potential performers who present as much as audition on the Vinewood Bowl to attempting to persuade folks of their imaginative and prescient to balancing folks’s real-world schedules when deciding on occasions and locations to apply in-game, Grand Theft Hamlet finally ends up an incredibly correct depiction of the numerous hurdles that come up within the newbie theatre world, albeit with the added disadvantage of mischievous interlopers crashing rehearsals simply to shank the actors or blow them to smithereens. That half isn’t fairly so acquainted to the performers, and it retains them on their toes, whereas additionally making the entire train really feel like cabin fever-induced insanity.
The additional Crane and Oosterveen get into their staging, the extra difficult it turns into. Quickly, it turns into a touring manufacturing inside the world of the sport, as curious viewers members are requested to observe the actors between a mess of harmful places, like atop a floating blimp, a inventive ambition that’s certain to end in self-sabotage, because the actors’ avatars die mid-performance courtesy of side-splitting accidents. Nevertheless, the extra time they spend attempting to boost their model of Hamlet, the extra the actual world begins to creep in by means of the corners of the body.
Society wasn’t going to stay at a standstill ceaselessly, and their actors have been sure to be pulled in numerous instructions as quickly as circumstances modified. Nevertheless, a key factor of the drama can be the connection between the play’s two administrators, and the way their differing private lives (Crane is a household man; Oosterveen is extra of a loner) intersect with the film’s premise. The pandemic and its ensuing lockdowns affected folks in numerous methods, however what Grand Theft Hamlet manages to seize is how folks emerged from the pandemic mindset at totally different occasions, and the way this discrepancy might have strained relationships within the course of.
The romantic relationship between Crane and Grylls is a key fixture of the film too, and Grylls seemingly phases key conversations between them inside the world of the sport, although they dwell in the identical family. It’s hardly naturalistic, nevertheless it makes use of the identical inventive logic as trendy actuality tv, the place actual tensions and interpersonal dynamics are heightened for an viewers’s gaze. The important thing distinction is that this little bit of relationship drama additionally finally ends up on the mercy of the sport’s mechanics, in piercingly humorous ways in which blur the traces between private and non-private moments.
Nevertheless, these mechanics additionally present a singular distinction to the subject material at hand.
Grand Theft Hamlet is a surprisingly poignant reflection on dying.
Between the film’s pandemic premise and its topics ruminating on one in every of Shakespeare’s heaviest texts, Grand Theft Hamlet echoes the concept of mortality in a number of quiet methods — the concept of what it means “to be, or not to be” — all whereas blaring explosions maintain interrupting the actors’ makes an attempt to rehearse.
There’s maybe no extra surreal an area through which to mirror on dying than inside a online game the place violence is so frequent and cartoonish that one turns into desensitized to dying, because it’s just a little greater than a repetitive annoyance as our bodies are flung in numerous instructions. Nevertheless, this casually brutal backdrop additionally forces the play’s macabre themes of vengeance and cosmic inevitability to the floor, through farcical depictions of lethal violence that — deliberately or in any other case — perform as heightened re-enactments of the textual content.
If something, the medium of Grand Theft Auto finally ends up the right spoonful of sugar for Shakespeare’s enduring, contemplative medication. This fixed unfurling of the play’s subtext turns the film into an inadvertent act of arts criticism within the course of, one the place ostentatiously personalized participant avatars, with brightly coloured hair and superhero outfits, perform each as de facto philosophers and as deeply private externalizations of the actors’ personas and neuroses.
One character specifically, a North African immigrant unfamiliar with the play, auditions with a Quran verse as a substitute, whereas showing within the type of a shiny inexperienced alien. It’s as if he have been each disguising himself and making a cartoonish manifestation of the best way he feels as a newcomer to English society, and it finally ends up being one of many movie’s most touching reflections on the human expertise.
The movie maintains a razor-thin line between life and dying, not solely due to how simply the sport’s digital avatars are changed into bloody pulp, but additionally due to the best way these violent pictures are thrown headfirst into textual evaluation and repetition every time the actors rehearse. The very act of efficiency — of channeling feelings and turning them into artwork — is among the most vivid, human, and alive processes of which we’re succesful. So, to have the ability to carry out regardless of being robbed of conventional efficiency areas is virtually defiant, spitting within the face of a lethal plague in essentially the most uproarious method. There’s nothing fairly like Grand Theft Hamlet.
Grand Theft Hamlet is now enjoying in theaters.
UPDATE: Jan. 17, 2025, 9:23 a.m. EST Grand Theft Hamlet was reviewed out of SXSW 2024. The article has been republished with up to date launch info.
