Andrew Scott gives the best performance of his career in "Elsinore" Simon Stone's film tells the true story of actor Ian Charleson and his production of "Hamlet"

Elsinore is not a film about illness — Elsinore is a film about acting. It is important to make this distinction from the outset in the story of real-life actor Ian Charleson and the final months of his life battling AIDS. The work by Simon Stone — whose most recent project in 2021 was the Netflix original The Dig — chooses to celebrate art and the sublimation that operates upon life as much as upon death, especially when it concerns enduring and defining works such as William Shakespeare's Hamlet. The role that the star of Chariots of Fire took on following Daniel Day-Lewis's flight from the stage in 1989 at the National Theatre in London.

An Everest for any actor, an indispensable title that encompasses every aspect of the human condition, Hamlet is an emblematic text that unites within itself what screenwriter Stephen Beresford has condensed into the story of Elsinore. It is at once a diktat for any performer — in which the protagonist teaches how to execute one's performance through an impeccable monologue on the relationship between truth, fiction, and the verisimilitude that lies between them — and an expression of human existence. Which, as the characters in the film say, makes it a work that can only be interpreted by those who have truly lived.

A role that arrived at the right moment in Ian Charleson's journey, despite the tragedy of his situation. In hindsight, it was a balm during the worst period he was going through, as a victim of a disease that left a painful and alarming mark above all on the queer community of the 1980s and 1990s — and also a purpose that the actor set for himself, to give meaning to his time on earth before he had to leave it. A goal that has something intimate and primal about it, inexplicable yet entirely understandable. To sacrifice one's health in order to become completely one with the character on stage, choosing to die at Hamlet's hand rather than at the hand of AIDS.

In the emotion that Elsinore manages to evoke — never manipulative, and in fact profoundly reasonable in its portrayal of its protagonist's need — the film touches raw nerves in viewers who may recognise in Charleson's necessity the drive to bring one's own passion to fulfilment through a play that, of all those ever written, is the closest to the state of mind in which he found himself.

A text that "speaks of being alive and of beginning to die" — the threshold on which the actor stands when he is asked to replace his colleague Day-Lewis, and also the precise parenthesis of his own desire to return to the roots of his love for performance and transformation. In a film that is also a reflection on how, in an era not so very distant, his homosexuality was a source of professional concern — undisclosed because it could have jeopardised his career and limited the roles he might have been offered.

A film that, subtly yet not entirely so, is a critique of a system that made shameful something that is not shameful in the least — one that contains within itself a multitude of feelings, above all of which burns the fire of its Ian Charleson and the image that performer Andrew Scott renders of him. In the finest performance of his career — and he has given more than one demonstration of being one of the most compelling personalities working today — the Irish actor transfigures himself by embodying his colleague Charleson and bringing him to life before the eyes of the audience. But what does it mean to have lived if not with passion? A sincerity that shines through every single line, every gesture, and every glance from Andrew Scott, who rightfully emerges as one of the leading contenders of the upcoming awards season.

In short, it is clear that there is truly something redemptive in Shakespeare's text to hold on to. In a place like the theatre, which continues to contain as much love as possible. And in a cinema that, as with Elsinore, seeks to absorb and distil its essence.