The Best Hamlet Movie Adaptations, Compared

Every ranked list of Hamlet films argues about the same thing: who played him best. It is a fair argument and an unresolvable one. There is a second question underneath it that actually has an answer, and almost nobody asks it, which is how much of Shakespeare’s own text each version keeps.

Below are the versions worth knowing, with what each one does to the text and to the play’s most-staged speech. Hamlet’s own scene about how to perform a play is a doorway in the playable Hamlet, where you direct the troupe yourself.

📜 The question with an answer: how much text survives

Hamlet is long enough that filming all of it is a decision, not a default. Branagh’s 1996 version made that decision and is described by Britannica as a four-hour, uncut version drawing on both the First Folio and the 1605 quarto, and by its Wikipedia entry as the first unabridged theatrical film of the play. Every other screen Hamlet you are likely to meet is a cut, and the cuts are where the directing actually happens.

The version every ranked list opens with is older and much shorter. Laurence Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet took Best Picture, and took Olivier the Best Actor award, on the Academy’s own record of that ceremony and the film’s Wikipedia entry. It is also, necessarily, a cut, because the first unabridged one arrived forty-eight years later. The most decorated Hamlet ever filmed won its prizes with a version of the play that leaves a lot of the play on the floor.

This matters for a reader more than a viewer. If you have just finished the text and want to see what you read, a two-hour film will quietly remove a subplot you spent an evening on. If you want the film to make you want to read it, the shorter versions are frankly better at that job, and there is no dishonour in starting there.

The cuts follow a pattern once you know to look for it. What survives every adaptation is the family: the ghost, the mother, the uncle, the girl. What goes first is the machinery around them, the ambassadors and the sealed letters and the foreign army moving in the background, because none of it carries a speech anybody came to hear. Cut all of it and the play still works as a family catastrophe, which is why so many screen Hamlets feel like a domestic thriller with a ghost in it.

There is a reading order worth knowing if you plan to do both. Watching first gives you a map, and the play is complicated enough that a map helps, though the film’s choices then become the ones you remember. Reading first is harder work. It also means every adaptation you meet afterwards reads as somebody’s argument about the play, which is exactly what each of them is.

The Arrival of the Troupe is a doorway in the playable Hamlet: a company of actors turns up at Elsinore and you decide what they perform, how much of the murder you write into it, and whether you watch the king or the stage. Role-play Hamlet →

🎭 The soliloquy people quote now

Robert Icke’s production opened at the Almeida Theatre with Andrew Scott in the title role, transferred to the West End the same year, and was broadcast on BBC Two the following spring. Its clip of the soliloquy has since become the version a lot of people meet first, which is a genuinely new thing for a four-hundred-year-old speech.

What viewers keep singling out is how unperformed it sounds. Scott plays the speech as a man working something out at ordinary volume rather than addressing a house, and the effect is that the argument becomes audible instead of the poetry. Whether that is a gain depends on what you came for; readers who love the verse-music sometimes find it flattened, and readers who bounced off the speech on the page often report that this is where it finally made sense.

It also changed what a Hamlet clip is for. The speech used to circulate as a set piece delivered by whoever happened to be famous that decade, judged roughly the way an aria is judged. It now circulates as an argument, and the responses under it are full of people reporting that they finally followed what he was weighing up and where he landed.

That is worth taking seriously as a fact about the play rather than about one actor. Hamlet’s speeches are arguments before they are poetry, and they were written for a theatre where the audience stood close enough to be spoken to directly. A camera two feet from a man’s face gets nearer to that than a proscenium arch does, which is an odd thing for the newer medium to be better at.

🪞 Branagh’s mirror, and why it divides people

Branagh stages the same speech against a two-way mirror, so Hamlet is talking to his own reflection while Claudius and Polonius watch from behind the glass. It is a directorial idea with an argument inside it: the soliloquy is not private, and the man giving it may know that.

The staging splits audiences hard. One camp reads it as the definitive version, cinematic in a way stage Hamlets cannot be, and gives Branagh credit for treating a four-hundred-year-old text as a film rather than a recording of a play. The other finds the mirror too clever by half and wants the camera to leave the man alone. A separate essay on this hub reads the speech itself, including the two things almost everyone gets wrong about it.

Both camps are answering the same practical problem. A soliloquy on a stage has a built-in audience and a camera has none, so a director filming one has to invent a reason for a man to talk out loud in an empty room. The mirror is one answer. Another is to move the camera close enough that the volume can drop to something a person would actually use alone, which is roughly the Almeida solution.

Each answer has an obvious objection. The mirror narrows the speech to self-observation, which is a real idea and a smaller one than the text will support. The whispered version makes it intimate and thins out the sense of a man building an argument he expects you to follow. Nobody has staged this speech without losing something, and the interesting part is watching a director decide what to protect.

🌍 Two versions outside the usual four

Gregory Doran’s Royal Shakespeare Company production with David Tennant, staged in 2008 and filmed for BBC television the following year, is the best answer to the stage-versus-screen question, because it is both. The RSC’s own record of the production describes a modern-dress Elsinore where the characters are never out of somebody’s sight-line, and the film keeps that surveillance idea by shooting a lot of it through security cameras.

The other one worth your evening is Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider, released in 2014, which moves the play to Kashmir during the insurgency of the 1990s and makes the missing father a disappearance rather than a ghost story. It is the third of Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare films, and it is the one that shows most clearly what the play is for: a country where nobody can safely say what they know, and a young man who decides to say it anyway.

The relocation does something a faithful production cannot. Elsinore in the text is a place where everyone is watched and nobody can say what they know, and on an English stage that condition stays abstract in a way it stops being when the setting is a real conflict with real disappearances in it. The play stops being about a prince and starts being about everybody who has to live where it has been set.

None of these versions is the correct one, and hunting for a correct one is the mistake the ranked lists keep making. A four-hundred-year-old play with almost no stage directions is closer to a score than to a recording, and a score never gets performed the same way twice. The useful question is which performance you want in your head first, because that is the one that tends to stay there.

Hamlet himself would have opinions about all of this. He spends most of Act 3 Scene 2 giving a company of professional actors unsolicited notes — “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue” — and then names the resulting production “The Mousetrap” on the grounds that the title is a joke only he and the audience will get.

“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.”