Elsinore (Stone, 2026)
In theory, I should love this one. I was a theater kid in high school, remember Ian Charleson’s performance in Chariots of Fire fondly, have empathy with the AIDS angle, and have an academic’s appreciation for Hamlet.
Yet I grimaced more than cried at the film. It wasn’t just that the film was predictible; the way that it announced its intentions made it feel more like a pitch than a finished movie. When Ian explains the National Theater’s tradition of actors banging on the glass of their respective dressing rooms, there is zero doubt, none, that this is going to be the film’s emotional climax. Ian’s debate over treatment with his doctor (Olivia Colman) are present for no other reason than to allow the character to verbalize his motivations for the audience. Because he keeps his diagnosis secret through most of rehearsals, his relationships to the other actors are not developed. His relationships with those who do know he has AIDS don’t fare much better. There is typically one big speech per relationship. Ian argues with another gay colleague about whether or not he should come out of the closet in an argument so stacked in Ian’s favor that it carries all the smug certainty of hindsight. (For what it’s worth, I hate using the word “smug” to describe any part of a movie about AIDS, but here we are.)
Andrew Scott, who plays Ian, does such a great job with his Hamlet rehearsals that he almost persuaded me that the film works as written. I think it might have worked had the second half managed to depict the grueling grind of rehearsals and treatment that is supposedly hastening his death. The last fifteen to twenty minutes of Elsinore is one long montage, which felt like a strange directorial decision given the film’s subject matter. I am not saying I needed another four hours to see a complete performance of Hamlet, just that I thought I was watching something about a man’s relationship to the little time he had left, and it was hard to buy his argument that this was the best possible way to spend it when the film celebrating him elides and compresses the process so much that it appears in a hurry to get him to his death scenes. It tells you — and keeps telling you — what an incredible achievement this was. That’s not the same as showing you. In that regard, it reminded me of the old Sean Connery film Finding Forrester, where we kept hearing how great a writer the teacher’s protege was only to be given a montage of the writing itself leading to the surrogate applause of the audience. (As an aside, after reading Mark Crispin Miller’s Seeing Through Movies decades ago, I have never been able to shake his observation about how many movies end with the main characters being surrogately celebrated within the movie as the cinematic equivalent of an audience prompter.)
Another place the movie falls flat is that it sees Ian’s challenge almost exclusively in physical terms. The vomiting, the chemo, the fatigue, the stamina. Structurally, rehearsals are a race against the clock, and yet we don’t get much sense of any emotional, spiritually, or psychological fear. There is dialogue with the doctor underlining that death is an important theme of Hamlet, but here again, we are left to discern for ourselves how, if at all, his impending death informs Ian’s preformance rather than simply making it praiseworthy. The one exception to that might be in the skull speech, which Elsinore smartly juxtaposes with the loss of one of Ian’s companions. So we see grief over others dying informing Hamlet’s grief. I wish we had seen more of Ian’s own fear at his own mortality informing the performance. Instead, we get more rehearsal snippets of anger and acceptance. I wish I had seen more of how coming to terms with death (“the readiness is all”) was hard won rather than just asserted.
Nevertheless, the film did win the People’s Choice award at the Toronto International Film Festival, which is almost always a precursor to some Oscar nominations. Unless voters are fatigued with Hamlet after the similar raptures critics gave to Hamnet, I predict Elsinore will play very well. And it is not a bad film, just overpraised.
Elsinore played on Day 2 of the 2026 Virginia Film Festival. For more information about festival screenings, check out the festival box office.
