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. Nonetheless, Grand Theft Hamlet explores this distinctive mixture of previous and current whereas revealing new and surprising 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 shifting.

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 type, it creatively tackles the subject of inventive frustrations whereas reflecting on mortality within the silliest potential methods. It’s considerate and brash in equal measure, and by the tip of its mere 89 minutes — brevity is the soul of wit, in any case — the film works regardless of all odds, proving to be a whole and utter blast.

What’s Grand Theft Hamlet about?

The movie begins as a run-of-the-mill “Let’s Play” — i.e., footage offered from throughout the recreation 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 change into a streaming cottage business, it might not appear to be essentially the most fascinating solution to make a characteristic movie. Nonetheless, 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 sequence that started in 2003 and is animated solely on this planet of first-person-shooter Halo. Nonetheless, 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 energetic, out-of-work English stage actors, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen — fellows of infinite jest — bump into an amphitheater throughout the recreation (the “Vinewood Bowl,” modeled off the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles). Earlier than lengthy, inspiration strikes, they usually determine to see what it could 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 partaking, 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 throughout the recreation itself. Shot from a mess of angles that swing round freely, untethered from bodily area, the movie is co-directed by Crane and his romantic companion, the filmmaker Pinny Grylls, who not solely capabilities 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 important 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 preserve busy throughout lockdown, or curious onlookers who don’t fairly perceive what they’re trying, however go together with it anyway. The easy job of staging a efficiency and drawing viewers and individuals proves hilariously tough, given the character of the sport. As they collect fellow actors inside this digital area, with every one performing soliloquies over headsets as their avatars repeat a sequence of restricted gestures, in-world cops and different on-line gamers typically disrupt Crane and Oosterveen’s peaceable gatherings. Grand Theft Auto is an inherently hedonistic world, and there’s nothing stopping some random third social gathering from exhibiting up, guns-a-blazing (or fists-a-swinging) only for the joys of it. These frequent interruptions result in resigned sighs from the unintended Rosencrantz and Guildenstern pairing every time they die and should respawn in some inconvenient, far-flung location earlier than making their method again to the digital stage.

It’s Theater Camp meets Punisher: Warfare Zone, a weird, farcical mix of good-natured creativity and cartoonish hyper-violence that locations numerous distinctive logistical roadblocks within the actors’ paths. 

Grand Theft Hamlet is a very 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 kinds, not solely because of the in-world logistics — how do you craft a peaceable neighborhood expertise in an area devoted to bullets and bombs? — but additionally as a result of real-world logistics.

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 making an attempt to persuade folks of their imaginative and prescient to balancing folks’s real-world schedules when deciding on instances 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 beginner theatre world, albeit with the added downside 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 throughout the world of the sport, as curious viewers members are requested to observe the actors between a mess of harmful areas, like atop a floating blimp, a inventive ambition that’s positive to end in self-sabotage, because the actors’ avatars die mid-performance courtesy of side-splitting accidents. Nonetheless, the extra time they spend making an attempt to boost their model of Hamlet, the extra the true 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 had been sure to be pulled in several instructions as quickly as circumstances modified. Nonetheless, a key component of the drama can also 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 several methods, however what Grand Theft Hamlet manages to seize is how folks emerged from the pandemic mindset at totally different instances, and the way this discrepancy could 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 levels key conversations between them throughout the world of the sport, though they stay in the identical family. It’s hardly naturalistic, however it makes use of the identical inventive logic as fashionable 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 strains between private and non-private moments.

Nonetheless, these mechanics additionally present a singular distinction to the subject material at hand.

Grand Theft Hamlet is a surprisingly poignant reflection on loss of life.

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 to not be” — all whereas blaring explosions preserve 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 loss of life, because it’s a little bit greater than a repetitive annoyance as our bodies are flung in several instructions. Nonetheless, this casually brutal backdrop additionally forces the play’s macabre themes of vengeance and cosmic inevitability to the floor, by way of farcical depictions of lethal violence that — deliberately or in any other case — operate as heightened re-enactments of the textual content.

If something, the medium of Grand Theft Auto finally ends up the proper 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, operate each as de facto philosophers and as deeply private externalizations of the actors’ personas and neuroses.

One character particularly, a North African immigrant unfamiliar with the play, auditions with a Quran verse as an alternative, whereas showing within the type of a shiny inexperienced alien. It’s as if he had been each disguising himself and making a cartoonish manifestation of the way in which 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 loss of life, not solely because of how simply the sport’s digital avatars are changed into bloody pulp, but additionally due to the way in which these violent photos 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 likely one of 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.