Claire McCarthy’s 2018 film Ophelia begins with a slow crane shot that pans gently over rippling, olive-green water. After a moment, the camera reveals the titular character floating in the water, a bouquet of flowers clutched in her hand, her long red hair floating out around her. As the frame finds her face—eyes closed, pale, unmoving—she begins to sink into the murky green depths. A voice over begins, “You may think you know my story. Many have told it. It has long since passed into history, into myth.”
The film begins, deliberately, in a place of familiarity. Even if we remember nothing else from our high school or college readings of Hamlet, we tend to remember that Ophelia drowned. It is the enduring image of her character, one that has transcended the boundaries of Shakespeare’s play and etched its place in the realm of allegory. The composition of the opening shot might feel vaguely familiar too, as the frame is designed to echo the 1894 painting “Ophelia” by Sir John Everett Millais. Millais was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of English artists, poets, and critics that formed in the second half of the 1800s, and whose work was known for its embrace of classical poses and inspiration, close imitation of nature, and a kind of yearning fascination with the female muse. In the opening shot of McCarthy’s film, Ophelia (Daisy Ridley) is styled like the quintessential pre-Raphaelite muse, the delicate, lovely woman made one with nature, meant to be admired even, or perhaps especially, in death.
Pre-Raphaelite paintings had something of a fixation on this kind of beautified feminine frailty. Women were portrayed as gentle and demure, with long hair and flowing dresses, generally posed in some way so as to emphasize their delicate wrists or collarbones. When they are alive, it seems almost as if they’re already half-dead with pallor or sickness, and when they actually are dead, like Ophelia, this only serves to elevate their beauty to saintly proportion. The model who posed for Millais’ painting, Elizabeth Siddal, was one of the most popular muses of the era, and not only did she nearly catch her death posing in a bath full of cold water for the work, she was also praised for “looking thinner and more deathlike and more beautiful and more ragged than ever.” It’s easy to focus on the artistic qualities of Pre-Raphaelite paintings—their impressive detail, vivid color palettes, dynamic compositions—but if you concentrate on just the women and consider how else the pictures could have been composed, you’ll start to recognize the way that we’ve been conditioned to accept the beautification, and even eroticization, of feminine weakness as inherent to artistic tradition.
By evoking Millais’ painting in the opening shot of her film, director Claire McCarthy summons all of our inherited knowledge about how women are portrayed in art until we are sitting in a room populated with our assumptions. Not only are we used to the image of the drowned and heartbroken Ophelia, we’re also familiar with poetics that exalt women in death, have been steeped in a culture that still values women’s looks over their actions, and have become downright trigger-happy when it comes to in killing off female characters in our stories in order to motivate men. This is the company McCarthy wants us keeping as we sit down to watch, so that each time the film disrupts one of our expectations, it hits closer and closer to home. And in the same way that Katha Pollitt’s poem disrupts traditional metaphors used to describe women, Ophelia disrupts our expectations about how this woman’s, or any woman’s, story might be told. The film is still clearly an adaptation of Hamlet, as the foundational elements are there—the King’s death, Claudius’s usurpation, Hamlet’s madness—however, nothing in this version happens quite how we remember it. And by the end of the film, we are let in on the visual wink of the opening shot: this Ophelia is no drowning damsel or bashful muse.
Perhaps the most significant disruption to the story comes with the presence of the narrator herself. “It is high time I should tell you my story, myself,” Ophelia remarks at the beginning of the film, immediately setting the stage for a different kind of story. And this is definitely a different kind of Ophelia. McCarthy’s version transforms her into a profoundly active character, taking us back to her childhood as a scrappy, curious youngster prone to dressing in boy’s clothing and going where she shouldn’t.
One day, during a feast at the castle, Young Ophelia (Mia Quiney) finds her way under a dining table and into a debate about Original Sin, specifically whether it was the snake or the apple that tempted Eve. Undeterred by the lofty subject, the public setting, or the potential judgement of the royal court, Ophelia pipes up matter-of-factly, “I think the apple was very much innocent in the matter.” This quip catches the attention of Queen Gertrude (Naomi Watts), who calls her out for inspection. She laments the girl’s appearance—unbrushed hair, ruddy face, tattered clothing—but young Ophelia stands her ground, commenting, “I may be a lass, but there is no call for such alas-ing.” It’s hard to say whether it’s Ophelia’s precocious wordplay or her uncut feminine potential that persuades Gertrude that day, but the Queen takes a liking to the girl and makes her one of her ladies-in-waiting.
The scene sets up, with just those two lines of dialogue, essentially the sum total of what’s about to happen in the narrative. The line about the apple presages the third-act twist in Ophelia’s own story—as the way the film plays it, Ophelia is like the apple herself, caught up in a conflict between Hamlet and Claudius and altogether rather innocent in the grand scheme of things. The a lass/alas-ing line also reads like a nice little dig at cultural tradition that values femininity as artistic subject or poetic muse while simultaneously restricting women’s freedoms and opportunities. Like the nod toward Millais’ painting, these two lines frame up the way that Ophelia is more than just a clever adaptation, but also a sharp critique of storytelling convention.
After Gertrude decides to take Young Ophelia under her wing, the film jumps forward to Ophelia’s adulthood, where she’s been polished into a beautiful, though still willful and snarky, young lady. She prefers bathing in the river and sneaking into the library over her duties as a lady-in-waiting, and in a dance lesson another lady remarks that she “dances like a goat.” Somehow, despite all this, Ophelia still manages to become Gertrude’s favorite, a position that affords her a special kind of intimacy and freedom with the Queen that allows her to move about the castle and witness moments that become central to the unfolding of the plot. The affection between Ophelia and Gertrude also adds to the quietly radical feeling of the film, letting us as an audience know that we are seeing this story through the eyes of its women. In one scene in particular, we learn that Ophelia is able to read, a skill that sets her apart from other women, even noblewomen, of the time. One night, when Gertrude is too tired to read herself, she calls upon Ophelia to read to her. She passes Ophelia a book and watches with a smile as the girl slowly realizes that “this is no devotional book,” but rather the era’s equivalent of erotic fiction. “Something much more important than prayer,” the Queen replies wryly, “Read on.” Shakespeare purists might balk at a scene like this, or even be tempted to write off the adaptation as a whole, but what this moment does is make it clear that this tale takes place firmly in the world of women, and by consequence will operate according to much different rules than the Hamlet we’re accustomed to.
Likewise, the courtship between Hamlet and Ophelia progresses rather differently than we might expect. Though they exchange a glance during the a lass/alas-ing moment as children, Hamlet (George MacKay) and Ophelia meet properly as adults for the first time at the river, where he comes upon her as she’s bathing. They cross paths again later that day, as the ladies observe a new tapestry being woven for the Queen. Hamlet offers his judgement of the tapestry, which features a woman in a forest and a quiver of arrows, and Ophelia corrects his interpretation, remarking that the arrows have not been left by a male hunter, but rather belong to the woman. “She is Diana, goddess of the hunt. She made her home in the forest. She knew no man until the hunter Actaeon came upon her.” The myth parallels their own meeting, as Actaeon hid and watched Diana bathe. “Was he punished for his trespass?” Hamlet asks. “Mercilessly,” Ophelia replies, “Diana turned him into a stag and his own hounds tore him apart.”
Ophelia recounts the story with a thread of resignation in her voice, and her thin, wry humor does not entirely measure up to Hamlet’s obvious flirtation. It’s an interesting choice in direction and performance, as it sets up the idea that Ophelia wasn’t initially as taken with Hamlet as he was with her. The allusion to the myth also emphasizes Ophelia’s innocence, though not in the traditional, chaste sense of the word. The way Ophelia tells it, “knowing no man” doesn’t insinuate that Diana’s life was somehow lacking before Actaeon came upon her, just as her own life has not been wanting until Hamlet arrived at the river’s edge.
In a later scene, Hamlet finds her in the garden during a masquerade ball and, after offering her wine from his cup, kisses her. Ophelia, with a kind of hesitant curiosity, lets it happen—surprise, confusion, uncertainty, and a small, flickering smile of delight all playing on her face in rapid succession. She says that she will be missed and returns inside, leaving Hamlet, besotted, to watch her go. Ridley’s performance makes it clear that this Ophelia, as a character, does not exist within the story solely to love Hamlet, nor does she exist only to be fallen in love with. She has her own life that predates his arrival at the castle, and even when she does begin to fall for him, it is not an event so grand as to overpower the rest of her life. Even as chaos begins to unfold—the same series of events we know from Shakespeare—she keeps her head about her and tries to preserve her own life as best she can.
There are a few fun twists here too, as in this version, it’s not Hamlet who sees the ghost on the ramparts, but Ophelia, and it’s not a ghost but Claudius (Clive Owen) waiting for Gertrude, whom he’s just propositioned, to meet him for a midnight tryst. Queen Gertrude is given a twin sister, Mechtild (also Naomi Watts), who lives in the forest below the castle and whose backstory makes it clear that Claudius was a beast long before he finds himself lusting after his brother’s wife and throne. Her storyline is too good to spoil, and could honestly merit a poem/post pairing in and of itself. And while Hamlet is still deeply distressed by his mother’s remarriage, he isn’t actually mad. In this version, the madness is a clever tactic devised by Ophelia in an attempt to hide their secret courtship, protect their marriage (they eloped to a nearby country chapel disguised as a shepherd and a country lass), and secure their future away from the castle and the royal court.
It all seems to be going to plan until Hamlet tries to out Claudius’s crimes through the staging of the play, Hamlet accidentally stabs Ophelia’s father Polonius, Laertes shows up to avenge his father’s death and challenges Hamlet to a duel, Claudius attempts to throw Ophelia in prison, and all of her carefully orchestrated plans get waylaid by men making, what seem to us now, ridiculous and self-sabotaging commitments to “duty” and “honor.” In the climactic scene of the film, Ophelia finds Hamlet moments before his duel with Laertes and offers him the chance to hold true to his word—to run away with her and live life away from the castle. By this point she has already convinced the court that she’s gone mad with grief, faked her own death in the river, been buried and dug up again by Horatio, and snuck back into the castle disguised as a pageboy, just to give her husband the chance to avoid certain death and live out the life that he swore to her he wanted.
When Hamlet, inevitably, chooses to duel Laertes, Ophelia doesn’t break down into tears or lose her composure—she does not become the heartbroken character we remember drowning herself in the river. Instead, as if she already expects his answer, she replies, “Goodbye, my love,” and uses the commotion of the duel to escape the castle, saving herself and—another key deviation—the life of her unborn child. It’s the perfect payoff of the apple line that was planted at the beginning of the film, as the crucial moment of her storyline comes not from losing “the love of her life” but rather from recognizing her own innocence in all this madness and seizing her chance to protect her own life and future.
All of this isn’t to say that Ophelia never loved Hamlet in this version—it’s clear that she did. Rather, the film makes the distinction that romantic love isn’t the be-all and end-all of a woman’s life. It makes me think of a quote by Adrienne Rich about how “heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty, and fulfillment.” I feel like there’s been a fair amount of popular discourse about the duty and fulfillment aspects of Rich’s point, but it was the adventure part that made me stop and write down that quote when I encountered it years ago. What happens to young girls when the majority of the stories they consume present romance as the greatest adventure of their lives? Think about what you might pack in your bags, what kinds of guidebooks might you read, what kind of research and prep you might do for that kind of adventure. Is that what we want girls and young women preparing for? In a Freudian slip that actually enhances this metaphor, I initially copied Rich’s quote down wrong, swapping “city” for “duty.” Think about this metaphorical city of Romance, heterosexual or otherwise—is that the only territory, the only streets and landmarks and home we want girls to know? Or would we rather them enter a library, like the one Ophelia sneaks into when she should be practicing her steps, and choose from any number of maps, scrolls, or tomes that might set them off in new directions toward unexpected adventures?
While there are many threads that weave together to form the genius of Claire McCarthy’s Ophelia, the way that it subverts this trope might be the one that shines brightest to me. In the final scene of the film, which takes place some years later, it is revealed that Ophelia has been telling her story to, or for, her daughter. In this new ending, which stands in sharp contrast to the watery end we know, Ophelia is less concerned with what she’s lost than with what she’s building anew. It’s a refreshing take on a finale that reframes the value of Ophelia’s life and places the emphasis on action. It is the act of telling her own story, of living her own life according to her own choices, that means something to her, and to us, in the end. As Ophelia tells her daughter, “I found my way to hope, to one day tell my story, as you, my love, will tell yours.” It’s easy to picture another, more Hallmark-y, version of this ending where Ophelia smiles at her daughter—the little girl a bittersweet reminder of Hamlet, her great lost love—and tells her that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. But what this version makes clear is that Hamlet, or love, isn’t the point—of the film or of Ophelia’s life. That, whatever it might be, is entirely up to her to decide.
I initially watched Ophelia with my mother, and at the end of the film she turned to me and said, “Well, if we can remake that, why not just remake everything?”
And why not?
If we can remake the Spiderman films three times in twenty years, why not start making our way through the canon of culture, stopping to visit each sidelined, overlooked, fridged, and forgotten woman and asking if she has a different story to tell? If Ophelia is any example, it seems like it might generate some interesting answers.