Every year has its own cinematic Shakespeare; now it’s the turn of "Elsinore".

Every year has its own cinematic Shakespeare. Last year it was "Hamnet – In the Name of the Son", directed by Chloé Zhao. A Chinese-American director who made a sensational breakthrough at the Venice Film Festival, when she won the Golden Lion for "Nomadland", followed by an Oscar for Best Picture and another Oscar for Best Director. In “Hamnet”, she does quite a bit of damage. The greatest of them all – who pilfered and copied plots yet still stood out from the rest of the world – is portrayed as a family man bereaved of his only son. This will be the impetus for him to write “Hamlet” and become famous. And immortal. And constantly imitated. Almost never by people as talented as he was.

The result is a feminist rant – “she lost a child, but instead of weeping she wrote a masterpiece; that’s just how men are” – which, if you really cannot resist checking it out for yourself, you will be able to see from next Monday on Sky. This year it is the turn of another William Shakespeare, “Elsinore”. The name of the Danish city where William sets – here we go again – the tragedy Hamlet. Director Simon Stone (born in Basel in 1984 and raised in Australia) has chosen it for his film. Bear in mind that at the age of 15, the future director (now in his early forties) decided to read all of Shakespeare’s works, in chronological order.

“Elsinore” – write those lucky enough to have seen the film at the Toronto Film Festival – is moving and entertaining. Let’s pretend that ‘moving’ is replaced by ‘tragic’, and the combination becomes more interesting. It brings to mind, for example, the veteran Shakespearean actor Albert Finney. In Peter Yates’s film The Stage Manager (1984), he is so out of his mind that – much to the despair of his stage manager Tom Courtenay – he paints his face black in the dressing room, forgetting that that evening he is due to play Hamlet and not the Moor of Venice. Elsinore was screened at the Toronto Film Festival; the Irish actor Andrew Scott played Ian Charleson, who was suffering from AIDS (this was in 1989; the original actor, Daniel Day-Lewis, had stepped down from the role). “I’d rather die playing Hamlet than die of AIDS,” he declares to the few who know his secret. As one critic notes, he is constantly accompanied by the music of Vangelis, which, in our view, might well be a good reason to leave this world.

Andrew Scott’s performance has been universally praised. However, there is a growing suspicion that the rest of the film does not maintain the same level of brilliance. Literature has never been treated with the respect it deserves by the cinema, and ‘Elsinore’ is certainly not going to reverse that trend. All that remains for us to do is rewatch Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. He certainly understood the nuances, the interplay between tragedy and comedy, and possessed boundless talent.