However, movies that take place inside a video game while being played by real players is a genre that, right now, consists mostly of Knit’s Island and 2024’s The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. To that short list we can add co-directors Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane’s documentary Grand Theft Hamlet, a hilarious and even moving chronicle of the COVID era that follows two out-of-work British actors dealing with the loneliness and creative boredom of lockdown by putting on a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet inside the world of Grand Theft Auto Online.
The film boils down 300 hours of GTA Online gameplay to a tight 91 minutes in which Crane and fellow out-of-work actor Mark Oosterveen walk, run, drive, fly, punch, and shoot their way through the game’s crime-infested version of Los Angeles while recruiting a troupe of willing GTA Online players to take part in this unusual staging of the Bard’s most famous play. Grylls and Crane laugh heartily at the disconnect between Shakespeare’s immortal words and the players tasked with reciting them, including the Tunisian-Finnish man whose avatar resembles the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Directors: Sam Crane, Pinny Grylls
Writers: Sam Crane, Pinny Grylls
Stars: Sam Crane, Mark Oosterveen, Pinny Grylls
They also make the most of GTA Online’s near-limitless world as they tackle in-game and real-life challenges across dozens of gorgeously rendered virtual locations to navigate in Rockstar Games’ magnum opus. This isn’t a documentary that can be dismissed as just an elaborate Twitch stream. It’s a boldly imagined work of cartoonish humor and light melancholy about the need for purpose and creative fulfillment, even as COVID was arguably heralding the end of the world.
Don’t be surprised if painful memories of lockdown come flooding back to Oosterveen and Crane as they use GTA Online to escape their stifling COVID confinements and explore an entire virtual world. Even the game’s omnipresent, cathartic, and disturbing violence serves its purpose: to take them “away from the crushing inevitability of their own life.” For Oosterveen, that life doesn’t include a partner or children, making his project an important tool for distraction and maintaining mental health. Crane does have a wife and children, and when he and Oosterveen decide to hold in-game auditions for their production of Hamlet, he recruits Grylls, his documentary-maker wife, to join the game (she initially wanted her avatar to look like Tilda Swinton), record it, and make a film about it.
This, of course, means that the Grylls certainly missed at least the birth of their madcap plan, as it’s doubtful she started recording until after the idea emerged in 2021 during the third COVID lockdown. That bolt of inspiration comes when Crane (whose avatar is a tough guy with an unbleached haircut) and Oosterveen (more normal in his beige puffer jacket) happen upon the game’s Vinewood Bowl amphitheater and begin an impromptu reading of Hamlet’s “Life is but a walking shadow…” monologue.
Their performance is interrupted by two visitors who promptly draw their guns as Crane implores them, “If I could ask you to refrain from killing each other.” Though police helicopters would soon arrive and Oosterveen would be gunned down, he and Crane agree to the crazy idea of holding auditions and rehearsals and then performing the entire play within the game’s virtual world.
By virtue of being able to travel to any location within the game’s open world, the filmmakers generate a nearly endless amount of funny and delicate visual interest during the play’s production process. And it never gets old to see actors rehearsing a scene and then getting punched, shot, or falling off a helipad. But during the audition process, Oosterveen and Crane, who describe themselves as “white guys in their 40s,” are also exposed to people of all colors and stripes whose avatars keep any preconceptions or prejudices at bay. One prospective cast member is trans and can relate to Hamlet, a character who is “finding his own truth.” Another, whose avatar is a shirtless man in a hat, is actually a literary agent and Hamlet fan who plays on her nephew’s gaming console.
Some of these deeper thoughts, especially those that remind us of the power of art as healing, add a charming dimension. At other times, there’s a sense of overreach, as when Crane muses on the meaning of Hamlet’s iconic “To be or not to be” soliloquy and then recites dialogue over shots of lonely, poor, and dispossessed people.
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