Curse of the Macbeths
2022: Angus Macfadyen

An adaptation of Macbeth (at the furthest limits deserving to be called an adaptation). It appears to be a reworking of the 2016 Macbeth Unhinged, cut by half an hour, but no less unhinged. It is full of filmic effects, while mostly being shot inside a stretch limousine. Macfadyen directed as well as starring as Macbeth. One wonders what point he had in mind.

The play begins with a quotation from Yeats’s “The Second Coming’ (“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” etc.) over a montage of vignettes from twentieth-century dictators from Hitler on. Most of the lines spoken are from Shakespeare’s text, but their relation to much of anything is more or less coincidental. It’s full of violent imagery, lots of people beating each other, and gratuitous blood, but it’s built on an incoherent plot that wouldn’t make any sense to one who didn't already know Macbeth, and of little or no interest to anyone who did. The murder of Lady Macduff is a cozy affair in the back of the limousine, with Lady Macbeth and Macbeth himself in attendance (why?), playing something like Russian roulette, and eventually of course a shooting, where fashion-model Lady Macbeth is splattered with blood. Duncan (ghost? memory?) keeps popping up, wagging his head and hollering, for no particular reason.

As a showcase for filmic effects dealing with over- and under-saturated color, interleaved with black and white, coupled with banal sound effects, it looks like a sophomore film school product from a student who didn’t make it to the next year. Macfadyen is good enough actor, but the conceit of this film is completely opaque to me. I at least can’t see a point to this undisciplined and self-indulgent exercise. The movie almost-meaningfully ends on the (genuine but misplaced) line, “signifying nothing”. That pretty well sums up the film.

There is an occasional moment of acting inspiration here, but all in all, it's not worth the effort. The film is rated R in Canada: I cannot find any evidence that it has a rating in the US. Parents and teachers take note. I can't imagine an adult really wanting to watch it anyway.

Buy Curse of the Macbeths streaming from Amazon.