Directors: Pinny Grylls, Sam Crane

The game’s the thing in this strikingly amusing and original documentary. During January 2021, the grimmest moment of the COVID lockdown, two jobless actors, Sam Crane, who had been due to start as the lead in ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and his mate Mark Oosterveen decide, while playing the Grand Theft Auto game, that they want to stage a version of the Bard’s most celebrated play in its virtual space. Sam’s partner, Pinny Grylls, decides to join them in the game and document their attempts. All of Grylls’s footage comes from the game itself. With amusing predictability, their initial attempts to recruit a cast wind up with them being brutally murdered. Eventually they manage to assemble a ragtag cast from the disparate souls playing the game, most memorably the affable ParTeb whose avatar is a green monster fond of throwing moves. Alongside the laughs, there is beauty and melancholy too in the deserted, windblown environs of the game, which prove a perfect analogue for Hamlet’s Elsinore, and the forlorn-looking NCP (Non Character Player) figures who look on as a kind of dour silent Greek chorus. The picture also works as a heartening depiction of communities coming together in benighted times.

David Willoughby

Follow David on Twitter @DWill_Crackfilm and Bluesky @davidwilloughby.bsky.social