Love Elizabethan-era stories about vengeful Danish princes? Then you're in luck, because 2026 is rife with adaptations of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Hot on the heels of awards weepie Hamnet – the 'untold' story of the creation of Hamlet – and just ahead of Mamoru Hosoda's anime Scarlet – a gender-flipped riff on Hamlet set in the afterlife – comes, well, Hamlet. But despite that more down-the-middle title, the Riz Ahmed-starring movie is just as distinct as its cinematic brethren, possessing the urgency and intimacy of a David Fincher thriller.
Directed by Aneil Karia (Surge) and written by Michale Leslie, it's a Hamlet adaptation that takes some surprisingly big swings. Primary among those is the decision to shoot it with a "kind of visceral first-person energy", according to Karia. "We made one big decision in the development process, which was: 'What if we experience everything with Hamlet? What if you encounter every problem in real time?" And it brought this singularity and interesting ambiguity to it."
