Elsinore review: I wept through Andrew Scott’s devastating AIDS epic
Elsinore at London Film Festival review: astonishing, devastating AIDS drama ★★★★★
Despite the rise of stories depicting the epidemic, the horrors of AIDS are still underrepresented in film and TV. Russell T Davies’ It’s A Sin brought freshness by focusing on fleeting moments of joy, and Simon Stone’s Elsinore borrows from that playbook with this magnificent story that follows one victim’s remarkable life.
Andrew Scott will now be celebrated not for his LGBTQ storytelling in All Of Us Strangers, but for Elsinore, his focused, magnetic account of the true tale of Ian Charleson, the actor who played Hamlet at the National Theatre in 1989, seven weeks before he passed away from the disease.
Elsinore film: I was shallow breathing throughout
Scott, who produces and stars, is devastatingly good as the man who would rather “die of Hamlet than of AIDS,” delivering agonisingly realistic blow-by-blow accounts of the pain Charleson was experiencing.
In one agonising scene, he rocks back and forth while having a seizure that feels grippingly lifelike: Scott’s impression of the frenzied Charleson in hospital haunts long after the credits; but his remarkably truthful performance brings lightness too, conveying Charleson’s rom-com warmth as well as his coyness.
It is a flatly astonishing story. Beresford’s script follows Charleson’s true, remarkable tale, as the actor prepares to take on the sword-bearing Prince of Denmark in spite of regular sicknesses that cause him to be bed bound in the weeks leading to opening night.
Though Elsinore, named after the fictitious castle in Hamlet, never gets waylaid by misery. There are plenty of laughs and heart-warming cameos. “You will perform,” Chaleston insists to one young Aids victim, played by Heartstopper’s Joe Locke, and we’re treated to a dozen patients delivering a choreographed musical number from the hospital ward.
Elsinore opens London Film Festival
There are hedonistic dinner parties; immersive depictions of cruising; and we’re plunged into rehearsals for Hamlet, camerawork bringing us within dripping distance of Scott’s perspiring pores, and then there is the National Theatre: dour, soggy shots around the Southbank cast the venue as a second, quiet lead.
An impeccable supporting cast includes Olivia Colman as Charleson’s no-nonsense doctor and LGBTQ ally, credited with extending the lives of thousands of men, and Billie Piper fizzes with tenderness, offering great comic timing as best friend Monica.
Scott, folded over and retching off stage after delivering the Prince’s lines, is just wretched, compelling viewing. You feel so desperately for all these men, and Elsinore draws you closer than ever to these subjects. At the press screening during the London Film Festival, running until 17 October, a rare round of applause from tight-lipped critics.
Almost 20,000 men died of AIDS in the UK alone before effective treatment came in in the mid-1990s. While early depictions of the epidemic like The Normal Heart, which premiered at the Royal Court in 1986, can feel didactic by today’s standards, Andrew Scott is surely due an Oscar for the agonising detail examined in Elsinore, which sketches out a fresh rulebook for a new era of LGBTQ storytelling.
Elsinore is in UK cinemas from January 29