Movie Review: "Grand Theft Hamlet" Explores New Possibilities With Filmmaking and Shakespeare

10/12 ForReel Score | 4/5 Stars

"To be or not to be"—that is the question that sparked millions of adaptations of Hamlet by William Shakespeare. His timeless play has been reimagined in movies and TV shows, but never quite like Grand Theft Hamlet, directed by Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane. The same question Shakespeare asked us hundreds of years ago now unfolds in the limitless, groundbreaking world of GTA V, where players attempt to adapt the classic tragedy to the game's chaotic rules and rampant violence. Sam Crane, in a fearful challenge, tries to survive one of the most difficult times in human history—the COVID-19 pandemic—while pursuing his dream of acting in the most surreal way possible. His creativity introduces a new form of storytelling that goes beyond traditional filmmaking, embracing the video game format as a kind of digital celluloid.

Let’s go back to 2020, when How to Disappear by Michael Stumpf—a short anti-war film seeking peace in the most unlikely place, an online war game—offered a new perspective on cinema in the digital era. A few years later, the Austrian short film Kinderfilm, directed by the collective Total Refusal and also set in the world of GTA, explored a vision that extended beyond CGI, embracing the boundless possibilities of video games. Also, one of the most important pieces in this kind of video game-cinema-making, Hardly Working, which puts the NPC characters in a philosophy and existentialism format, questioning their repetitive actions and quotes inside the videogame, Red Dead Redemption. 

These short films, in their own way, introduced concepts and abstractions that redefined film imagery within video games. But now, Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane bring it to a feature length format, raising profound questions about peace, violence, and the existential nature of humanity beyond the digital realm. Between chats and voice-overs from people whose faces we never see—only their in-game avatars—they take on personalities reminiscent of characters in an animated production. In a playful way, the constant explosions and gunfire interrupting their peaceful conversations in a war-zone game like GTA create a simple yet effective form of comedy while also making us question the limitless possibilities of video games within cinema.

While camera movements can mimic those of a live-action production, the constant glitches and the ability to change costumes, airplanes, and cars instantly are things that cannot be replicated so naturally within a traditional film frame—or even with CGI. This videogame-film-theater (as one of the characters called it) also explores the dynamic between human beings and video games, making us feel that there’s a story beyond the game itself. And what better way to explore that than through this unique medium? While the characters rehearse Hamlet's play, they are also exploring the world of GTA, where they can crash a plane, live or die instantly, reset the camera angle, or change perspectives—all while battling other players in the game. 

Grand Theft Hamlet is opening a new form of storytelling through the combination of cinema and video games, which can also engage the audience with questions, quotes, and conversations around the players during the play’s rehearsal. It is also a kind of cure for our protagonist in the outside world, seeking to make art as a form of refuge while COVID-19 is happening. At one point, we hear our protagonist paraphrasing Shakespeare’s Hamlet, saying: "It’s so beautifully expressed in this world—that combination of absolute, stunning beauty and grotesque, horrible, horrible violence as well." GTA V has a unique beauty of its own, a world where people from different places gather in the same space. From the very first shot of the film, Pinny Grylls, Sam Crane, and their group of talented people try to escape the horrors of the world and find beauty in a game where anything is possible. It may not compete with a big-budget Hollywood production, but where there’s heart, there’s art. And this film has a lot of heart, pushing boundaries and breaking the constraints of an industry marked by rules and stereotypes, creating the craziest adaptation of Hamlet—one that would have driven Shakespeare mad with excitement.