Ophelia (short)
2017: Jamie Sims

This is a short film, filled with images of bloody street fighting interleaved with shots of Hamlet (more or less) reciting pieces of Hamlet’s soliloquies to Ophelia, who soulfully but mostly wordlessly looks on. Various characters are shown taking drugs, downing drink after drink, and generally engaging in background debauchery and mayhem. The blurb for the film claims that it is “a visceral and urgent re-imagining of one of Shakespeare’s tragic love stories. Two people, both pushed to their own limits whilst trying to hold on desperately to each other, discover that love, too, can be just as destructive.” How the film shows any of this must be left for wiser heads than mine. How the images form anything approaching a story is unclear; how Hamlet should be classed as a love story in the first place is similarly obscure. The lines are delivered reasonably well, but are almost perversely sundered from any context that would give them real meaning. I suppose it’s meant to be very artistic and sophisticated. If one has a free hour, this is a way to waste a quarter of it.

Watch Ophelia on streaming video from Amazon