GRAND THEFT HAMLET - Mark Reviews Movies

Grand Theft Hamlet, Mubi

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 16, 2025

To discuss Grand Theft Hamlet is to also to talk about the purpose and potential of video games. Initially, games are a means of escaping reality for Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen. They're actors and friends who, in 2021, find themselves without work because of the ongoing COVID-19 lockdowns in the United Kingdom. With little else to do, they become immersed in the virtual sandbox of Grand Theft Auto Online, where players can roam freely around a fictional iteration of Los Angeles and the surrounding area. Yes, most of it results in violence, but it's all in good fun.

Crane, who co-directs this documentary, and Oosterveen are having fun, not only because of the game, but also because it's a chance for the friends to interact with each other, too—pretending to drive around a city, go to a casino, and hang out at one of their in-game apartments at a time when such social activities aren't safely available to them. As actors currently and indefinitely between gigs, they can commiserate with each other about their misfortune and, sure, take out some of that pent-up frustration on an innocent non-player character.

As a platform, the game seems to have one purpose within all of its assorted systems: to escape from reality by way of a kind of playacting. If that's the case, why can't the avatars within the game do something akin to real acting, as well?

The question, then, is whether or not a video game can become a platform for art. The debate about the nature video games as an art form has argued and contested for years now, but that's not what's being explored by Crane and Penny Grylls' film, which exists entirely within the world of the semi-eponymous game and pushes the perceived freedom of it to its creative limits. Could Crane and Oosterveen stage a production of William Shakespeare's Hamlet within the game itself and make that virtual production into a real act of theater?

There are many fascinating elements to this documentary, first and foremost being that it is shot entirely within the video game. We don't see Crane, Oosterveen, Grylls, or any other participant in the project until the very end, in some video of them having their experiment given some official validation. We don't know what any of these people look like, and after a while, we simply accept that their in-game avatars are enough.

The characters in the game can move, albeit in the imprecise way of games (lots of sudden stops and starts and bumping into assorted things in the world), and when our assorted actors speak through the microphone in the real world, the mouths of game avatars move, even if that motion is also inaccurate. Crane, Oosterveen, and the rest of their virtual cast can even command their characters to perform specific animations, from pointing, to dancing, and, as becomes important in this particular play, dying by suicide. Oh, they can stab and shoot each other with an arsenal of weapons, too, and since Hamlet and a lot of Shakespeare is inherently violent, the friends' idea, as ridiculous as it might initially seem, starts to come across as a sound one pretty quickly.

The rest of the narrative, then, becomes a sort of behind-the-scenes drama. Crane and Oosterveen, joined by the former's real-life spouse Grylls' character serving as an in-game documentarian, put out a casting call to others in the game, arrange auditions at a virtual amphitheater (that almost makes it look as if the game's creators might have considered this a possibility), and set up rehearsals for those who do take the plan as seriously as they do.

The pair make some new friends, including other actors currently in a state of professional uncertainty, and hit all of the usual snags that can come with an amateur theatrical production. Some additional ones, of course, include random players trying to shoot the actors in the middle of a monologue or cast members falling off a blimp while rehearsing. As for the more realistic complications, the show's original Hamlet, for example, gets a real job, meaning he won't have time to rehearse and play the most verbose of Shakespeare's characters. That especially stings for Crane and Oosterveen, who still have no idea when or if they'll be able to get back their own jobs anytime soon.

It's little wonder, then, that the in-game production becomes a fixation for the pair—especially to Oosterveen, who is single, lives alone, and travels before starting the process for the funeral of his only surviving relative. On the one hand, the documentary gives us a step-by-step account of how Crane and Oosterveen organize the play and expand its scope to take advantage of the game's complexly constructed and gorgeously rendered world (The game doesn't need it, but the film serves as an unintentional ad for it for those who might not have any interested in it otherwise). On the other and in between the stages of rehearsal and beyond, the film becomes a pointed examination of obsession, as Oosterveen makes the project the center of his life and Crane starts to overlook his real life in order to support his friend and, more to the point, to make the experiment worth all of the effort.

Whether or not the pair created art by way of a video game is an open question, because footage of the performance is, unfortunately, minimal in the documentary. Whatever the final results of the actual project, though, Grand Theft Hamlet is a fun and perceptive film about the drive to create by whatever means, even virtual ones, are available.

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