Grand Theft Hamlet Dares to Find the Humanity of Art in a Flawed and Violent Online World

I can admit that, at age 11, I probably shouldn’t have been stepping into a world where, as an Eastern European expat, I was shagging women, hunting down war traitors and searching for that ever-elusive American Dream in Liberty City. But I’d been begging my mom to buy me a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV since a pre-release trailer dappled our living room television in criminal hyperbole. But she swiftly rejected the ask, every time. She’d heard about the game and knew what its “M” rating meant. The Grand Theft Auto videogame series had been—and still is—shadowed by controversy since its inception in 1997. Most people, even if they’ve never played a lick of GTA, would likely identify the franchise as problematic and link it to extreme violence. And that is largely fair and true. By the time I actually got to load GTA IV into my PlayStation 3 for the first time, I was a teenager and far-too desensitized to have any nuanced, internal conversations about the fucked-up chaos playing out on-screen, at the consequence of my fingers moving controller buttons. But I, like millions of other players, became addicted to the high-res, low-brow art of GTA.

So, the idea that a film made within the open world of Grand Theft Auto V would be not just one of the most-compelling features of the past year, but one of this decade’s greatest documentaries seems improbable, perhaps even ludicrous. If there is a GTA game to be played, there is something for somebody to get up in arms about. Allegations of glamorizing violence, missions involving the assassinations of police, military personnel and public figures, gang war storylines denounced by anti-defamation groups, interactive sex mini-games, drinking-and-driving, full-frontal nudity, drug dealing, player-initiated torture (including, but not limited to, electrocution, teeth-pulling and waterboarding) and plenty of sexism would kneecap any other franchise, but Grand Theft Auto remains strong. GTA V alone made $800 million on its first day, and it pulled in over $1 billion by the end of its first weekend in September 2013. In the 11 years since, it’s moved more than 205 million units, making it the second-best-selling videogame of all time, and the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto VI will likely surpass that number upon its release later this year.

But Grand Theft Hamlet is not a love-letter to the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Rather, it’s a making-of love-letter to what the existence of such a free-wheeling videogame premise can become to players eager enough to challenge the very limits of the game itself. How far can you go with what resources are available? If you play your cards right, you can have billions of dollars in your bank account, own enough garages across the city to house cars rarer than some of the finest gems imaginable, kill important people and evade the cops just by driving farther than them, become a small-business owner by buying a dispensary, strip club or movie theater, rent an office and call yourself a CEO, hold up convenience stores at gunpoint, particpate in drag races or get plum sloshed with methheads at outskirt bars. But, sometimes, all of that isn’t enough. And it certainly wasn’t enough for Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, a couple of Brits who decided to cast and perform a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the online world of GTA V.

Crane and Oosterveen are both actors with serious dramatic CVs. Crane himself starred opposite Mark Rylance in a production of Claire van Kampen’s Farinelli and the King, and he even studied at Oxford and LAMDA. At first, it’s funny hearing two English men blowing through their money at the Diamond Casino & Resort near the Los Santos racetrack while lamenting the impending responsibility of caring for their real-life wife and child. And it feels especially fish-out-of-water for a couple of theatre alums to make a documentary about performing Hamlet in GTA. But Crane had a voice-acting role in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate in 2015. He and Oosterveen may be thespians, but they are gamers, too. And there is a crux to Grand Theft Hamlet’s existence, and it’s that it was created during the pandemic, as the production begins during the UK’s third lockdown in January 2021 and stretches more than two years into the future, concluding in the summer of 2023. Crane and Oosterveen, like many of their peers in the film industry, were quarantined at home and left without work or income, so they turned to GTA V as a place of productivity in a deluge of global uncertainty. As they say, “You can’t catch COVID in GTA.”

Speaking for myself, I found the early fits of the COVID-19 pandemic to be an especially fruitful time for videogame-playing. I hadn’t owned a console in almost nine years, not since my PlayStation 3 broke around 2012, and there were far too many games to catch up on. After sporadically playing the snowed-in prologue mission at least five times at friends’ houses over and over in the half-decade prior, I got a PlayStation 4 and finally completed a genuine play-through of GTA V in early 2020. And now, five years on, videogames are an integral part of my personal life. When I am not writing, I am often gaming. So, if you had a similar experience during the pandemic, then the premise of Grand Theft Hamlet’s creation will likely resonate.

But, in my household alone, discovering the existence of Grand Theft Hamlet immediately garnered two wildly different reactions. I, a GTA zealot who’s logged thousands of hours zig-zagging across San Andreas both online and in-story, was floored by the idea of a major documentary feature focused on such a polarizing but important game. My partner, a non-gamer with no skin in the GTA game, was not so easily convinced that anything of the sort could be categorized as “good.” And Grand Theft Hamlet is not a normal documentary, mind you. That is an important caveat, as all 89 minutes exist within the game itself and every scene is captured via Machinima production. Our only contact with the people involved comes via their avatars and animated lips moving out-of-sync with the actors’ real-time dialogue. If you are not a “gamer,” Grand Theft Hamlet may very well challenge your patience. It’s cinematic but not always; the filmmakers are unafraid of the game’s choppy, incongruous, NPC-heavy algorithm being on full, irritating display.

Fans of Grand Theft Auto will certainly laugh from their bellies at some of the chaotic, oft-unavoidable and deeply maddening aspects of the game portrayed in the film, like the inevitability of gruesome death in the online realm of Los Santos. Your demise—even as you plead for your life to players from every background you can think of—will come and, no matter how brief, it will suck. And it will throw a wrench into whatever plans you and your mates are drumming up. But Grand Theft Hamlet has more heart than the game it takes place in, illustrating how impossible it is to make a videogame more human than humanity itself. And yet, life is so absurd, emphasized by the documentary’s establishing shots, which begin earnestly with the Los Santos landscape—of rolling hills, a smoggy cityscape, and NPCs that all, quite literally, look the same. Then, a cut to a player yelling “wee” while trying to outrun cops. He and his mate are driving golf carts, about to be wasted. But then, they’re wading into Vespucci Beach, dreaming of a real getaway once lockdown ends. Grand Theft Hamlet brings one thing into sharp focus: the flaws in computer-rendered worlds make about as much sense as the one we’re all actually living in.

As Crane walks out of the casino, he beats up the valet and then shoots a bystander with an SMG. “A bit of mindless violence,” he says. “The crushing inevitability of your pointless life,” Oosterveen replies, before the two actors drive away in the Duke O’Death. While on the run from cops, Crane and Oosterveen (who have adopted the usernames “rustic-mascara6” and “Ooosters”) stumble upon the Vinewood Bowl for the first time. It’s GTA’s version of the legendary Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, and, seeing the stage, the two actors strike up an idea, declaring that it would make for a great place to put on a show—more specifically, it would be a great place to put on a performance of Hamlet.

And it takes a long time for this whole production to work. They put out calls for players to come to the Bowl and audition, only to be ambushed by retaliating agents of chaos and the hordes of police they bring with them. Audience members kill each other with lasers. There are carjackings and deaths from thousands of feet above. Grand Theft Hamlet is, at times, too nonplussed to be scripted. And that’s when the documentary is at its best, showing just how difficult it is to plan anything in such a lawless place. While Crane and Oosterveen are scouting locations for scenes, they are murdered by disinterested gamers who wound up on the same server as them. A Spanish player dressed in full military garb mistakes their production for a porno; Oosterveen delivers the “it is a tale told by an idiot” monologue to him in Crane’s in-game apartment and the Spaniard immediately exits the room.

Crane’s spouse (and the doc’s co-director), Pinny Grylls, becomes the play’s director and serves as the point-of-view camera for most of the production. She gleefully says that she and Crane playing the game together reminds her of when they started dating. They flirt (“How do I slap your arse? I quite fancy you, actually,” Grylls says to her blue-haired hubby after a few drinks) and bemoan their bleak and blackened future (“Everything’s shit. I have nothing now”). Later in the documentary, after Crane has already spent nearly two years trying to bring Hamlet to fruition, they have a hard conversation about his obsession and how it’s affecting their relationship—Grylls points out that the only time they ever spend together anymore is in the game. While Crane is AFK, Oosterveen confides to Grylls that he just went to the funeral of his last living blood relative. It’s these quick flashes of non-game-related life that blurs the line between fact and fiction, raising questions we can only answer with our own unique experiences.

One of Oosterveen’s friends, Dipo Ola, is a compelling Hamlet before he gets a real job and is no longer able to commit all of his time to the show. There’s DJ Phil, a literary agent and mom who uses her nephew’s GTA account to audition and defeats Crane in a hysterical duel. Nora, a retail worker, performs her first monologue ever and shines. There’s Nemo-164, TillySeal, HairySammoth, Turkomos, MysteryFedora, Woffdawg and ProNessNess, people who are full-time dads, meat roasters, players with voices for radio and unemployed actors with far too much time on their hands. Yet, they make the Grand Theft Hamlet world feel personal and united. And when a player auditioning expresses their anxiety, Crane is quick to affirm them and their budding talent. The audition sequence is one of the film’s greatest triumphs as, even in a virtual, disjointed world like GTA, the makers find a community worth sticking around for. As Crane says after they solidify the cast, “People fucking turned up, Mark!”

For the Grand Theft Auto faithful, the small, game-specific details will soar. When Dipo is gunned down while performing a monologue, the cast retaliate by blowing up the assassin’s helicopter. Audience members cheer by waving their hands, giving a thumbs up or strumming an air guitar. At various points in the film, Crane’s in-game phone rings with various characters wanting to give him missions. He and Oosterveen get into bar fights, seize yachts and oggle billboards. Crane makes pretend phone calls and sends pretend emails from the Hamlet office. Later, while trying to rehearse a scene that takes place on top of a blimp, he falls off and plummets to his death. Shots of NPCs smoking cigarettes and walking through walls make a compelling argument that, even at its ugliest, there is cinematography to be marveld at in GTA V. As players try to figure out just how the hell they’re going to actually pull the production off as the country begins to open back up and the actors are returning to work, explosions and NPC screams can be heard ringing out en masse in the background. Characters say goodbye by putting a bullet or two into someone else’s chest. It’s all very blasé and beautiful and determined and remarkably sweet.

Despite the highly-sensationalized, satirical Americana of GTA V, the game’s online world is a true melting pot of cultures. In Grand Theft Hamlet’s main cast, there are Black characters, Hispanic characters, white folk, women and trans people. There are characters who are ever-present yet remain curious bystanders, their silence outmuscled by their cooperative, encouraging presence in Crane and Oosterveen’s story-building. There’s someone dressed up like the in-game “liberal” superhero Impotent Rage who becomes the show’s de facto stage manager, as well as ParTebMosMir, a bazooka-weilding figure in a green alien suit with their ass out who becomes the production’s guardian angel. You’re rooting for Crane and Oosterveen to pull the whole thing off and, in-between the Wim Wenders-style shots of a desolate, widescreen Sandy Shores and a conspiracy theorist NPC complaining about Israeli war blimps, it’s hard to believe that they won’t.

Days after watching Grand Theft Hamlet, I am still thinking about the film’s turning point, when Crane and Oosterveen begin their search for the true meaning of the all-too-lionized “to be or not to be” soliloquy. The actors seek refuge in the company of someone with a pot leaf tattooed on their cheek; they look for an answer in the presence of a dive bar’s pet python. A cop shoots them dead with a shotgun and nearby NPCs cower away. A homeless woman in the game’s Skid Row begs for cat food money; a drunk declares he’s fucked up off of toilet bowl cleaner; Crane recites the speech while wearing too-short swim trunks in a Suburban clothing store. As they press on, the mortal coil they’re searching for slowly becomes a bit more legible, against a backdrop of yacht jacuzzis, chain-smokers, dead cops and ParTebMosMir crashing a fighter jet into a rehearsal.

Grand Theft Hamlet puts the Bard’s work into a resourceful context, and thank God, because Hamlet is some of his dullest material. It’s a vehicle that Crane and Oosterveen first use to outmuscle isolation and boredom, only to watch it turn into a hilariously intimate source of camaraderie. The film is a flashback to a not-too-long-ago tragedy, a synthesis of the universal distraction of pandemic videogame-playing into a vulnerable recollection of common ground. The characters we meet remain anonymous, but they are all bound together by a search for truth and purpose in each other’s company.

There are infinite lives in the world of GTA, and it’s a kind of immortality that is as innovative as it is deeply necessary. The anonymous players could have all left Crane and Oosterveen behind without warning, but they stuck around anyway. The characters in Hamlet are having an identity crisis, but the cast of Grand Theft Hamlet couldn’t be more sure of themselves—because humanity is something to be shared, not avoided. Shakespeare once said, “All the world’s a stage.” So, too, is Los Santos and its never-ending cache of curious and chaotic people. When a SWAT team repels onto Vespucci Beach and wastes Crane and Oosterveen while they’re making a recruitment video, Crane delivers the one sentiment that Grand Theft Hamlet turns into a non-negotiable, pandemic or not: “You can’t stop art, motherfuckers.”

Director: Sam Crane, Pinny Grylls
Release date: Feb. 21, 2025 (Streaming on Mubi)

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.