The fantastic documentary Grand Theft Hamlet chronicles the mission of two out-of-work actors to combine Shakespeare’s tragedy “Hamlet” with Grand Theft Auto.
Writers and Directors: Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls
Genre: Documentary
Run Time: 90′
World Premiere: SXSW
BFI London Film Festival Screening: October 15-20, 2024
U.S. Release Date: TBA
U.K. Release Date: TBA
Imagine you are seeing a William Shakespeare play, perhaps for the very first time. Now imagine a helicopter is on the stage and the audience members – including one in a neon pink leotard – have started shooting at each other. Then at the actors. Then the police arrive, resulting in a massive gunfight as the actors begin their performance. Welcome to the world of Grand Theft Hamlet, an attempt to combine Shakespeare’s tragedy “Hamlet” with the online version of Grand Theft Auto (GTA), Rockstar’s video game franchise that is as violent as it has been successful.
Co-written and directed by a husband and wife duo, actor Sam Crane and documentary filmmaker Pinny Grylls, this is one of the stand-out films at this year’s BFI London Film Festival.
On the surface, Grand Theft Hamlet is an odd concept. But “Hamlet” is an inherently bloody story of revenge and death, which makes it perfect to showcase what the film’s opening calls a “violent and beautiful virtual world.” Furthermore, cinema and theatre have started adopting aspects of video games for a while. There is the ‘machinima,’ a portmanteau of machine and cinema that has seen narrative videos and films created within video games. Even recently, a soon-to-be-famous director showed off the power of bringing theatre to gaming as Celine Song (Past Lives) staged Chekhov’s The Seagull in The Sims 4 and streamed it online.
The thing to know about GTA is that its ‘sandbox’ environment allows players to roam freely, leading to limitless possibilities. Yet those possibilities do include mindlessly violent crimes that range from the cartoonish to the brutal. It leads to unfettered chaos where players can randomly shoot and kill you. This is one of the many things that will need to be navigated in this endeavour.
Like Song’s Seagull in Sims 4, this was a project born out of the pandemic. In January 2021, a third UK lockdown means theatres are still closed. Both Sam (who was supposed to be on stage in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) and Mark Oosterveen were out of work and spending their time playing GTA. When they come across an empty amphitheatre, it sparks the idea of staging “Hamlet” within the in-game world of Los Santos. Grylls logs on to document this operation (making an avatar who looks like Tilda Swinton). Soon, the two are planning elaborate, location-sprawling staging for this production. “All the world’s a stage” and all that.
Auditions are held, with Sam and Mark assembling a cast of role players and actors. They also find a Finnish-Tunisian player known as ‘ParTebMosMir,’ who dresses as an alien and later provides security in a fighter jet. Again, this is a world of limitless possibilities. But then the troupe struggle to find time for rehearsals. Real life starts getting in the way, as evidenced when the actor playing Hamlet has to pull out when he gets a job. In a parallel that highlights how varied and complex Grand Theft Hamlet is, this nightmarish lack of control mimics the lack of control felt by many in 2021.
It turns out that this play is the thing, wherein we catch the consciousness of Crane and Oosterveen during this difficult time. There are worries over their unstable careers, with Sam bringing up a notorious UK government advert that encouraged those in the creative industry to retrain. There are deep emotional layers too. Mark’s dedication to this project hides a loneliness that has worsened after the recent death of his last blood relative. Meanwhile, Sam (who is prone to feelings of hopelessness) has been spending more and more time in the game, neglecting Pinny and his family.
I fell in love with Grand Theft Hamlet almost immediately. It is a fantastic and wildly inventive documentary that plays into the absolute absurdity of its central mission, leading to unpredictable and extremely entertaining moments. Additionally, shooting the film entirely in-game allows Crane and Grylls to show off the cinematic quality of GTA. There are some gorgeous shots here of Los Santos achieved by the camera being part of the in-game engine, with Grylls alternating between third-person, first-person and a camera phone that allows her to capture close-ups and pans.
This is a film about obsession and the creative process, about how performances manifest themselves in the digital realm (whether it is with how the avatars look or how they use ‘emotes’ as a form of physical expression). It proves the centuries-long legacy of the Bard, updating the violence and existentialism in “Hamlet” for a new millennium and medium. It captures feelings of isolation and the online communities that form. And the film reveals all this in a merging of reality and technology, of documentary and fiction, of three different realms with a lot in common.
There are contradictions of beauty and depravity in “Hamlet,” GTA, and a world slowly coming out of a devastating pandemic. Terrible things make us question our existence, but good things can also emerge from them. Grand Theft Hamlet demonstrates that ingeniously and impeccably.
Grand Theft Hamlet will be screened at the BFI London Film Festival on October 15-20, 2024.
