For Shakespeare’s Hamlet “the world is out of joint”. In screen writer Michael Lesslie’s collage of Shakespeare’s play, directed by Aneil Karia, Riz Ahmed’s intense, grief-wrecked Hamlet pays a high price as he tries to “set it right” in a corrupt corporate world.

This Hamlet is a radical adaptation that mostly uses Shakespeare’s words but relocates to contemporary, uber-wealthy south-Asian London. Hamlet has had a south-Asian makeover before now, most famously in Haider; a 2014 action packed Hindi film set in 1990s Kashmir. Karia’s Hamlet, however, is far moodier, more muted and uneven. Some of it is brilliant, some less so. But there is a stunning pay off at the end.

The recent film Hamnet repositioned Hamlet as a response to Shakespeare’s son’s death. Ahmed’s prince also returns the focus to fathers – after all Shakespeare’ father died around the time Hamlet was written. The film asks the audience: whom can we trust?

The opening has Hamlet performing Hindu funeral rites on his father’s body, guided by his concerned uncle Claudius (Art Malik).

Within moments of the coffin going into the furnace and the lavish wake beginning, Hamlet is taken into a side room where Claudius announces he will marry his brother’s poised and pragmatic widow, Gertrude (Sheeba Chadha). This will protect Elsinore, the ruthless family business of developers and builders.

With Hamlet in shock from this announcement, his friend Laertes (Joe Alwyn) takes him off........

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