You May Have Missed: Grand Theft Hamlet (Dir Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls, 1h29m, 2024)

So many of us now play and live, at least partly, in digital worlds, playing other selves, idealised, imagined, or escapist; I am one of them. Cinema is no stranger to fictionalised versions of this, from the seminal Tron to Steven Spielberg's middling adaption of pop culture smorgasbord Ready Player One to all manner of anime movies, including two(!) by Mamoru Hosoda (Summer Wars and Belle) in which normal teenagers are catapulted into the worlds of their favourite games and beyond. Yet, cinema seems reticent to use these gaming worlds we live in to tell stories of those who play them. There are outliers, much of which, under the rough banner of Machima, became a counter-cultural remixing of games, with Halo's Spartans featuring in the animated (and entirely formed from game footage) sitcom, Red Vs Blue. 

Machima is now a dimly remembered thing of the 2000s and 2010s, and the majority of works using real games as setting are either for comic effect (South Park's "Make Love, Not Warcraft" episode) or dramatic, such as the remarkably affecting documentary,  The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (2024) in which the impact of a young man with muscular dystrophy on his fellow World of Warcraft players, and the charming, if lightweight Dad of Light, itself based on a blog, in which a father and son reconnect through Final Fantasy XIV. Both have no illusion that their spaces of fantasy wars and grand tales are, ultimately, places of connection. During the pandemic, these places became refuges, bastions of connection as 2022's We Met in Virtual Reality postulates, in its at turns touching and profoundly strange take on people forming connections during this era. 

All Our Players...: Mark Oosterveen and Sam Crane's avatars in Grand Theft Auto

These spaces, these films may show online gaming as extensions of the internet, of places where strangers meet, but they have this additional facet of companionship, of guilds, and co-operation, of humanity at its best. Not so Grand Theft Auto, a violent simulacrum of American gangster cinema and humanity at its worst, as satire of 21st Century America, and yet, enter, stage left, Grand Theft Hamlet, a film entirely - but for a mid-credits sequence - set within the online version of Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V). As its name belies, it covers the slightly mad, but undeniably exciting idea of, mid pandemic, using a game as a space to put on a play. Thus we are quickly introduced to our duo of out of work actors, co-director and actor Sam Crane, and Mark Oosterveen - Crane's wife and the film's other director, Pinny Grylls soon joining.

Following an overview of where each of the major figures in the film are in January 2021, and indeed a few bursts of the violence and chaos of GTA V, the duo quickly stumble across an amphitheatre in the game's world, and from here, slowly form their plan, to dare to use this space of chaotic shoot-outs, ever-circling virtual police and ultimately meaningless chaos and randomness, to stage arguably Shakespeare's most famous play. What follows over the next hour or so is at turns an exploration of life in isolation, akin to 2021's Homeroom, depicting the final year of school for a cohort of students in 2020, a chaotic, but ultimately uplifting attempt to defy odds to put on a show, from auditions to rehearsals to actual performance, all of it pushing its cast of Crane, Grylls, Oosterveen and outwards to their breaking point. 

Yet, despite pitfalls, what we are ultimately left with is a tale of co-operation against maddening adversity and a meditation on Shakespeare's importance . I am, after all, writing this in the same week as the release of Chloé Zhao's Hamnet, a film that mingles Shakespeare, his personal loss, and plague, and much like it, Grand Theft Hamlet understands Shakespeare's words. Grand Theft Auto, for all its violence, unstands what drives Shakespeare's heroes and villains: revenge, power, money. To call Grand Theft Auto's world beautiful seems strange, antithetical to its very nature: few people are considering its sunrises, its late nights, its cityscapes, and every so often Crane and Grylls cannot help but step away from their narrative to show the NPC denizens of the game, spouting violent, bizarre, and often profane things. 

All the World's A Stage: the troupe begin their Grand Theft Hamlet performance

For all this violence, there are tender moments, from Crane considering Hamlet's view of mortality, and several members of the troupe acting for the first time on this most outlandish stage but there are beautiful moments, beautiful shots in Grand Theft Hamlet. That that is a world that allows escape from edgy lockdown Britain takes on another level. The best of these, and there are many, including the arrival of the bizarre alien-attired figure who acts as unofficial bodyguard to the troupe, and the juxtaposition of its centrepiece of the preparation for the online performance of the play, Hamlet's soliloquy delivered as Crane's character walks across a beach in heavy rain, feeling at once cinematic, waves crashing in the distance, juxtaposed with the isolated figure.

This scene is brought to a screeching halt, as so many are, by people playing a videogame, shooting dead Crane's character, just as they blow up, drive into, sink, and otherwise cause chaos for the group of actors. The film occasionally does lean into these moments of pique, of our troupe's irritation at people playing Grand Theft Auto for its stated purpose as all-round action movie simulator, rather than collaborative digital theatre space; but this slaying's timing is so perfect it's almost comic. It is the moment the film's elements gel, the moment that, hit by the virtual slings and arrows of rocket launcher and handgun, that Grand Theft Hamlet becomes more than its parts, a strange digital counterpart to Branagh's In the Bleak Midwinter (1995), of people trying to make sense of themselves and their hardships through performing - of course - Hamlet.

Grand Theft Hamlet is more than just a film about people bonding over videogames, more than a film about Shakespeare, more than a film about the pandemic. It is a film about how we use these digital worlds to connect, even if connection was never their purpose, and how, above everything, Shakespeare's work remains relevant, across the world. After all, we ourselves become players of a sort, playing roles upon digital stages, strutting and fretting our hours in myriad kingdoms, 'til "Game Over" returns us to this one.

Rating: Highly Recommended

Grand Theft Hamlet is available via streaming from Mubi

Next week,we conclude our look back at 2025 with Paul Thomas Anderson's action thriller, One Battle After Another.