Daisy Ridley stars in the trailer for the William Shakespeare re-imagining, Ophelia. Following her breakout performance in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Ridley has found time to work on a handful of films in-between her trips to a galaxy far, far away. In addition to her voice role as Cotton-Tail in Peter Rabbit, Ridley also costarred in Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express and shared the screen with Tom Holland in the yet to be released Chaos Walking. She will reprise her turn as Rey for a third (and possibly final) time this December, when Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker hits theaters.
Before then, however, Ridley will play Ophelia in this summer’s Hamlet retelling. The film has been sitting on the shelf for over a year, following its premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. An adaptation of the novel by Lisa Klein, Ophelia re-tells the tragedy of Prince Hamlet (George MacKay) from the perspective of its heroine, Ophelia, as she tries to navigate the power struggle that ensues in Denmark when Hamlet’s father is killed and his uncle, Claudius (Clive Owen), assumes the role of king.
IFC Films has picked up Ophelia for distribution and released a full-length trailer online, ahead of the film’s arrival in June. The cast here also includes Naomi Watts as Queen Gertrude, along with Tom Felton as Laertes, and Devon Terrell (Barry) as Horatio. You can check out the trailer in the space below.
Ophelia certainly looks like a beautiful shot film in the trailer, courtesy of director Claire McCarthy (The Waiting City) and her cinematographer Denson Baker (who did some second unit work on Get Out). Unfortunately, the early word from Sundance is that Ophelia’s a bit of a mess, otherwise. Most of the negative reviews point the finger of blame at the script by Semi Chellas (Mad Men, The Romanoffs), which apparently doesn’t retell Hamlet from a fresh perspective so much as it outright changes the story. And while that would be fine if the movie was trying to be a complete re-imagining of Shakespeare’s original play, it seems that Ophelia feels more like ungainly fan-fiction than a clever re-examination of a famous story from a specific woman’s point of view (a la Maleficent, Wicked).
This explains why Ophelia struggled to find a distributor, despite its terrific cast and intriguing modern approach to a centuries-old tale that’s already been re-imagined and repackaged many times over. Still, it’s possible word of mouth will improve around the film, once it’s made available to the masses. There’s always a crowd for Shakespearean projects and Ophelia will mostly have them to itself, when it opens this summer. Branagh’s Shakespeare biopic All is True will also (finally) reach theaters in the next couple months, so fans of the Bard in general have lots to look forward to.
Ophelia begins a limited theatrical release on Friday, June 28, before it becomes available On Demand starting July 5.
Source: IFC Films
