Scarlet review – Mamoru Hosoda turns Hamlet into tale of prowling knights and deep ‘nothingness’

Film versions of Hamlet are the new buses; you wait for ages for one, then three come along all at once: first Hamnet, then Riz Ahmed’s take on the Danish ditherer, and now this anime reinterpretation. But visually ravishing though it is, Scarlet is a hefty disappointment from director Mamoru Hosoda, a leading light from whom we expect more than an incoherent and overbearing fantasy.

Hosoda kicks things off with the exploitation version of the Dane: Claudius (voiced by David Kaye in the English version) and Gertrude (Michelle Wong) bragging about their intent to murder poor old King Amlet (Fred Tatasciore) and snatch the throne. His offspring Scarlet (Erin Yvette) is left, as in the play, to vacillate about payback – but Claudius gets there first by feeding her a vial of poison. She is given a reprieve though, when she wakes up in a wasteland purgatory populated by the usurper and his prowling knights. After being dispatched, these minions dissipate into the deeper “nothingness” that also awaits her if she doesn’t succeed in her quest for vengeance.

The director has serious past form in spiriting alternative realms, right up to the scintillating virtual reality in his last film, Belle. But Scarlet’s netherworld feels provisional and arbitrary, from why the very-much-alive Claudius and minions are there, to the lightning-spewing leviathan that courses through the sky at narratively convenient times. Or why paramedic Hijiri (Chris Hackney) is the only modern resident of this universe, other than as a mouthpiece for Hosoda’s sententious tendencies; tolerable in his other films, but weakly dramatised and baldly stated here. Playing foil to the vengeance-minded princess, Hijiri upholds his pacifism to an often quite ludicrous extent, like when being charged on horseback by bandits.

Coupled with a line in vacuous philosophising (“What is it to die? And what is it to live?”), Scarlet doesn’t exactly rise to the lyrical heights of Shakespearean humanism – no matter how many times it presses its hero to learn to “forgive”. The one palpable hit is the animation: lofty-statured, sharply etched, 3D-augmented character work that, against immaculate sands and near-photorealistic rubblescapes, is reminiscent of the great comic-book artist Jean Giraud at his otherworldly finest. All the more mystifying, then, why the Elsinore sections languish in often sloppy and ungainly 2D – presumably a stylistic choice, but an inconsistency all too common in a frustratingly scattershot trip down the rabbithole.