The Tragedy of Macbeth review

As Macbeth, Denzel Washington gives a performance of quiet authority. He does not boom his lines, instead he delivers most of them in a low voice, sometimes little more than a murmur. He is contained and introspective, but also physically imposing. You would not want to cross him. He murders with brutal efficiency, while also evoking the melancholy of a man who has seen a lot of life, of war, but who has perhaps missed out at his shot at glory.  

Frances McDormand’s Lady Macbeth – a role she has played on stage before, in 2016 – is harder and brisker in comparison, but she softens slightly when she is at his side. McDormand’s performance feels more stylised, but her face is tailor-made for the film’s more static passages.  

The actors’ age plays in their favour. Older than the Macbeths are usually portrayed, they have the air of a long-married couple, whose intimacy is expressed through glances, in the sliver of a smile. The entanglement of sex and power that characterises some adaptations is absent, or at least subdued, but they are tied together by something deeper. It’s easy to imagine they have been carrying around the grief of their lost child for a long time, a shared pain. There’s something faintly fatalistic about their lunge for power. It’s now or never. 

Alongside Washington and McDormand, much of the supporting cast is made up of faces familiar from the British stage. Bertie Carvel is an affable, bristly Banquo, Alex Hassell – who played a swaggering Prince Hal to Antony Sher’s Falstaff – is a slippery Ross in a role that is more prominent than is often the case. Corey Hawkins (Benny from In the Heights) also stands out as a charismatic Macduff.   

But it’s Kathryn Hunter who leaves the most lasting impression. She plays the witches, all three of them, sometimes as a single, bendy, genderless entity, sometimes triplicate, contorting her limbs in impossible ways and croaking her lines while crooking her knee behind her neck. She is truly unearthly, her reflection eerily tripled in a pool of water. She returns later in the film, perching in the rafters in a black hooded robe, half monk, half crow, sicking up children’s fingers to drop in her witches’ brew.  The shapeshifting Hunter even doubles (or should that be quadruples?) as a wizened old man.  

Arguably Macbeth has a lot in common with the Coens’ past work. You can draw a line from this all the way back to their noir-inspired debut Blood Simple. Macbeth is the essence of noir. The brothers’ work is peppered by fallible, morally compromised characters whose behaviour often steers them towards a messy end, characters who are bad at being bad. At the same time, this is a film that’s in constant conversation with its theatrical origins. (Apparently, Hunter showed Coen some of the stage designs of Edward Gordon Craig and it’s possible to see his influence in the stark interiors that at times resist logic). 

The pandemic has resulted in numerous projects that straddle the gap between stage and screen. The National Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet did so ingenuously, but many more fell awkwardly between two stools. The theatricality of Coen’s Macbeth is one of rigidity, the characters often isolated from one another – it is elegant but also austere, but as cinema, it is deeply sensuous. It casts a spell.