Ophelia (2019)

Ophelia arrives with a thesis taped to its forehead: that the most famous drowning in English literature was a miscarriage of narrative justice, and that the lady in question deserved better than a garland and a grave. Claire McCarthy's film grants her a secret marriage, a staged death, a dug-up resurrection, and finally a daughter and a quiet exile. Shakespeare's Ophelia gets a funeral. This one gets a whole surviving life. The reclamation is thorough, sincere, and treats the original play as a document in need of correction, which it is.

The cast is almost uniformly white, which suits a Danish court rendered in the usual heritage-cinema palette, and one exception stands out. Devon Terrell plays Horatio, a traditionally white Shakespearean part, and he is good in it. The film never asks us to think about this. Race is not a subject here, and the lone piece of nontraditional casting floats free of any argument, which some will call progress and others will call decoration.

What the film does argue, relentlessly, is that Ophelia had an interior life the play denied her. It makes that case by showing instead of telling, a mercy in an era when so many revisionist projects stop the action to explain themselves. Naomi Watts doubles as Gertrude and the banished twin Mechtild, and the last act hands Gertrude the sword that finishes Claudius, a correction that lands with some force. The enterprise is a literary rescue mission, earnest and occasionally inert, and the less said about the paid-review campaign that briefly turned its Rotten Tomatoes page fresh, the better. It wants to give a dead girl agency. It mostly does, and the effort is legible from the first frame.