As a child, nothing felt more illicit than “Grand Theft Auto” (1997–). I remember asking a friend’s older brother to buy me a used copy of GTA IV (2008) from Gamestop after cross-country running practice, later indulging my pubescent curiosities by visiting the in-game strip club or picking up a prostitute. Between missions, there would be shooting sprees and car chases, cop-killing and bank robberies, hijacking a helicopter and jumping from the top of Rotterdam Tower (an in-game Empire State Building). The world of GTA was a limitless playground of violent, boyish fantasies, inoculated from the moral panic surrounding the franchise by its over-the-top unreality. Still, why couldn’t a moment of empathy stop my havoc in its tracks, if only for a moment – before blowing off its source’s head?

Grand Theft Hamlet (2024), a new documentary directed by spouses Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane, is a pseudo-social experiment in splicing humanity into a world notorious for its callous brutality. Happening upon Vinewood Bowl (GTA V’s version of an amphitheater in the Hollywood Hills), the film’s protagonists, played by homebound, out-of-work British actors dicking around online during the pandemic, hatch a plan to put on a production of Hamlet (c. 1599-1601). For, if all the world’s a stage, then what better backdrop than than the virtual city of Los Santos?

Throughout auditions and rehearsals organized on an open server, Sam and Mark suffer the 21st century’s slings and arrows: grenades and rockets, bullets and SWAT cars, their castings eventually ranging from strange to exquisite. One auditioner slams a sports car into a barrier at full speed before calmly introducing themselves. A mild-mannered woman wows in her audition, only to be replaced after her callback by her nephew, newly returned to the plastic controller. A random server member, dressed in an alien avatar and speaking questionable English, literally crashes the process – only to become the production’s mascot and stage assistant. Despite the hijinx, Sam and Mark muster a cast.

It doesn’t take long for the real world to creep in. When the prince of Denmark leaves for a real job, the directors ponder whether the whole project is damned, even juvenile. Following Crane’s delivery of “to be or not to be,” their lead actor’s abdication carries not only the half-millennium-old question of the endurance of life’s sufferings, but, backdropped by a pandemic that would not be unfamiliar to Shakespeare, whether theater, in such context, is even worth staging.

Among so many teenage chaos agents and wandering NPCs, the human players behind some of the character avatars shine through. During one after-rehearsal hang, Nora confides in her fellow cast mates that she’s recently come out to her flesh-and-blood family as trans, harking back to an internet before AI slop and endless bad news, still filled with promise to transcend the limits of embodiment. Despite its uncanny valleys, GTH zooms in on flashes of vulnerability as broadly horizoned as the virtual world.

Perhaps the film’s greatest strength is in Grylls’s generous eye for Los Santos and “its people,” largely caricatures of American life. Her camera work, confidently composed among so many sudden explosions, captures the NPCs like the Depression-era photographer Dorthea Lange, taking the same care in her close-ups and careful meditative movements as she would with any ordinary documentary subject. The audience sees themselves in their scars, wrinkles, sullen eyes – now no longer afterschool cannon fodder, but canvases for their own experience, like background figures in the Wimmelbilder of Northern Renaissance painting.

GTH is an exercise in feeling out the boundaries of what is worthwhile, even possible, when artistry admits of failure. Grylls, Crane, and Oosterveen successfully celebrate a form so scantly regarded by the gamer demographic in no small measure because of their openness to an environment rife with with bizarre, the laughable, the broken-off. “Theatre is always a self-destructive art, and it is always written on the wind,” critic Peter Brook writes in Empty Space (1968). Though he hardly could have foreseen GTH’s very literal self-destruction, when mid-production, a blimp carrying the audience and cast explodes.

___

Grand Theft Hamlet is distributed internationally by MUBI. A schedule of screenings in US, UK, and Irish cinemas is available here.