The animated documentary "Grand Theft Hamlet" was released in the U.S. in January this year and is streaming exclusively on the platform MUBI. It won the Grand Jury Award for Documentary Feature at the SXSW Film Festival in March last year, and I'm hoping more and more people keep watching it.
Set in January 2021 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and its subsequent lock downs, two actor friends Sam and Mark are out of work and stuck in their respective homes in the United Kingdom. While playing the famous video game, "Grand Theft Auto Online" (2013) together, they decide to stage a production of Shakespeare's famous play "Hamlet" inside the virtual world of the video game. They recruit strangers they meet in the video game, hold auditions, hold rehearsals, and endure through anxieties and discouragements.
This film is the most daring and successfully inventive new release I have seen so far this year. It's shot entirely inside the open-world of this video game, and all the people are represented by their customized digital avatars. No people are actually "shown" in this documentary, but their real voices are heard throughout.
"Grand Theft Auto" is a multi-player video game all about violence: shooting people, stealing cars, and evading the police. It's the unlikeliest of places to present a piece of classical theater, and this unexpected creativity is why this film is so much fun. It merges high-brow culture with low-brow flair and has hilarious moments of verbal blunders when strangers introduce themselves and possibly shoot each other.
When speaking to some of the random players in the video game, one of the directors says, "If I could just request that you refrain from killing each other. And don't kill the actors either."
In this fantasy online world, people end up connecting with each other, and through this strangest of ideas, a community is formed. So many times while watching this I thought, "This premise should not work. Placing an entire story inside an artificial video game setting is weird. There's no way these men can keep this group of people under control and focused to perform in this play." But by the end of this film, I was totally convinced. "Grand Theft Hamlet" is a delightfully off-beat reminder that creativity is necessary for everyone and so is togetherness.
