Christina Ann Rinaldi

I started a MUBI subscription last night, and based mostly on the cover image (description below), and partly on the fact that I had yet to watch any rendition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I decided to screen the 2024 “documentary” titled Grand Theft Hamlet.

The film is a recorded experience of two friends IRL who are British stage actors, frustrated from the pandemic lock-down, that meet up inside the popular game Grand Theft Auto. While running from the GTA police, they find themselves walking upon the vacant outdoor amphitheater known as Vinewood Bowl. While there, they begin considering the idea of staging a performance at the digital venue. They then recruit a documentary film maker, and agree to put out a call for auditions in the form of video filmed within the game. By the end of the film, I was left with a feeling of longing to have witnessed the full performance in the game.

Anthony Lane, staff writer for The New Yorker, wrote a review about the film stating: “If I had to pick the most accurate guide to G.T.A., … I would plump for the retrospective words of Horatio, who, surrounded by corpses as the play winds down, tells Fortinbras and the English ambassadors exactly what they’ve missed. The speech is not included in “Grand Theft Hamlet,” and that’s a pity, because it sounds just like a trailer for the game:

Now, back to the aforementioned cover image that originally piqued my interest in the film. In short, it’s a masterful digital creation of a 2021-pandemic-lock-down version of a Baz Luhrmann-esque Shakespeare: Firstly, in the foreground, there is the phthalo green hair of the main character dressed in all black, standing stage left, holding a candy-colored handgun. Behind him, a stretch limousine parked on an overgrown grassy hill with a smoggy skyline of Los Santos, (the fictional city in GTA) faded behind it. Opposite the main, standing stage right, is a contrasting character wearing all white, looking back and upward at two figures standing on top of the limousine, one of which is turned to the other and watching a gun-toting green alien backflip off the limousine’s roof. The character in black, the character in white, and the bright green back-flipping alien form a pyramidal composition famous for representing balance and stability within a scene. A very well styled, and staged, screenshot. Suffice it to say, the limo, being the nostalgic icon of luxury that it is, and the selective neon colors set against the muted scene was a much appreciated click-bait for the elder millennial.

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