Review: Grand Theft Hamlet

Directors:  Pinny Grylls, Sam Crane

Wandering aimlessly during the first COVID lockdowns, when getting out of the house for walks was encouraged to keep us active and from going totally mad, there was something haunting yet beautiful about the quietude. I live in a rural city. Sounds like an oxymoron, but its the best way to put it. Even so, the emptiness of the roads and the scant encounters with other people gave the feel of a decidedly tranquil, lonely apocalypse. Awful as those months were for many reasons, there was something powerful about those abandoned avenues and empty roundabouts.

Watching Grand Theft Hamlet – an inspired documentary about two out-of-work actors aspiring to mount a Shakespeare production inside of the online video game Grand Theft Auto during lockdown – it struck me how similar the game environment is to those days walking around my empty home town. Not that I was ever particularly in danger from impromptu helicopter missile strikes or random car-jackings per se. Rather the familiarity of desolate environs, nagging emptiness and the sense of a limited, confined microclimate. And that therefore, perhaps subliminally, focal subjects Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen were drawn to the psychological echoes provided by GTA’s city of Vinewood; a virtual world mirroring the emotional quarantine of the physical one.

Grand Theft Hamlet is captured, in the main, by Sam’s filmmaking partner Pinny Grylls. The entire documentary takes place within the game world, with Sam, Pinny and Mark made digital flesh by their in-game avatars. Already we have a Shakespearean ripple effect to do with facades happening, and a fluid, exciting approach to Hamlet itself, which famously concludes with a play-within-the-play. Here there are layers to the very form.

The ability to be ‘anyone’ becomes a very playful feature of the encounters the trio have while holding in-game auditions, quickly adapting to the arrival of amateur players who don’t necessarily need to conform to gender binaries… or even appear as human. It presents, perhaps unintentionally, the beautiful freedoms and self-expression inherent in online gaming (even if it does so in an environment where you’re more likely to be heartlessly blown to pieces than engaged with amicably).

Mounting even the most cursory of rehearsals often ends in (un?)expected carnage, and the ways in which Sam and Mark are routinely sabotaged lands belly laugh after belly laugh. There’s also something inherently funny about two mild-mannered 40-something British actors trying to politely approach anonymous gamers of unknown and diverse global backgrounds in this perpetually chaotic environment. Grand Theft Hamlet is the best communal cinema experience this side of Hundreds of Beavers, fully leaning into the game’s most lurid, anarchic and gonzo attributes with a wry, affably British sigh.

As the project wears on, an air of dejectedness haunts Sam and (particularly) Mark, and an air of melancholy permeates. It tessellates lyrically with the barely-populated skyscrapers, beaches and parking lots that make up the GTA landscape. On occasion the interactions between Sam and Pinny feel fashioned for the purposes of a defined dramatic through-line. While this tendency toward reality TV narrative-building feels obtrusive and unnecessary, it isn’t overplayed, and there’s so much rousing, giggle-fit inducing mayhem surrounding it to make such missteps utterly forgivable in the grander scheme of this most unlikely of underdog stories. By its elated conclusion Grand Theft Hamlet manages to become surprisingly aspirational, even if this sensation is countered by the artist’s perennial doubt that their endeavours have had any quantifiable worth.

This folly of a pet project borne of a COVID lockdown has become one of the year’s most audience-friendly documentaries. Prior knowledge of GTA is far from a pre-requisite to getting colossal enjoyment out of this madcap endeavour, which stands as one of the most relatable expressions of the ennui, boredom, dislocation and communal spirit of the pandemic era.

It’s an absolute blast.