Ophe­lia

It can­not be stat­ed enough how ter­ri­ble the wigs are in Ophe­lia – a fem­i­nist take on ​‘Ham­let’ in which Shake­speare him­self is miss­ing in action. Direc­tor Claire McCarthy and writer Semi Chel­las have tak­en the female char­ac­ter with pos­si­bly the least agency in any of Shakespeare’s work, put her in an awful wig, and giv­en her full con­trol over her destiny.

The mis­sion to trans­form this play into a mod­ern pro­gres­sive state­ment (which, strange­ly, only draws on scant ele­ments of the orig­i­nal text) is evi­dent from the off. ​“It’s high time I should tell you my sto­ry myself,” Ophe­lia (Daisy Rid­ley) declares in voiceover while drown­ing in a riv­er, allud­ing to John Everett Mil­lais’ famous painting.

Ini­tial­ly Ophe­lia is mis­tak­en for a young boy and lat­er becomes Queen Gertrude’s (Nao­mi Watts) favourite lady in wait­ing. Her duties include prepar­ing the Queen’s bath, read­ing soft medieval porn to her before bed and, oh, going into the woods dressed as lit­tle red rid­ing hood to obtain more youth potion from a witch named Mechtild (Watts again).

Their close rela­tion­ship quick­ly and abrupt­ly changes when the Queen learns that her son Ham­let (George MacK­ey) has fall­en in love with Ophe­lia. Once the King dies at the hand of his mis­chie­vous broth­er Claudius (Clive Owen), Ham­let returns to avenge his father and pun­ish his moth­er at the expense of his ​‘true love’.

Despite attempts to ham­mer it home, McCarthy strug­gles to estab­lish a fem­i­nist stand­point through the female char­ac­ters and their rela­tion­ships to one anoth­er, as well as with the men. Gertrude is por­trayed as a shal­low, cru­el wife whose unmet needs lead her to plot her husband’s mur­der. All of the oth­er ladies in wait­ing are mean and spite­ful. Even Mechtild is depict­ed as a weak woman hid­ing from the world because she lost the only thing that a woman can pos­si­bly want or need in life – her unborn child.

Ophe­lia, mean­while, is con­fused and con­sumed by her infan­tile love for Ham­let. She rejects his advances at first, then falls for him, wants to die when she thinks him dead then ends it with a ​‘farewell’ when he faces the pos­si­bil­i­ty of real death.

Rid­ley brings the same sin­cer­i­ty and feroc­i­ty to Ophe­lia that she does to Rey in Star Wars, and Watts deliv­ers a cred­i­ble per­for­mance that revolves around van­i­ty and midlife cri­sis. MacK­ay man­ages to con­vince that he is either in love or mad, at times both. How­ev­er, the sto­ry and per­for­mances are repeat­ed­ly under­mined by McCarthy’s deci­sion to focus on the grandiose (but often dull) set­tings, in many instances pure­ly for aes­thet­ic gains.

The bold cin­e­matog­ra­phy doesn’t com­pen­sate for the lack of a con­sis­tent tone and style. Rid­ley looks like a god­dess most of the time, but the over-the-top cos­tumes make this film feel like a sil­ly fairy tale rather than a seri­ous tragedy. Hav­ing made the deci­sion to aban­don Shakespeare’s lan­guage – per­haps con­sid­ered too sophis­ti­cat­ed for the young tar­get audi­ence? – the result is a con­fused melo­dra­ma more fit­ting for a retelling of Twi­light in the woods than of the great­est play ever written.