In Elsinore, Andrew Scott gives the performance of his career as Ian Charleson, the actor who played Hamlet while dying of AIDS.
Director: Simon Stone
Genre: Biographical, Drama
Run Time: 111′
TIFF Screening: September 14, 2026
U.S. Release: December 2026
U.K. & Ireland Release: January 29, 2027
London, 1989. Ian Charleson (Andrew Scott, of All of Us Strangers) is a gifted stage and screen actor known worldwide from Chariots of Fire. He’s bored by what he’s being offered. Then, when Daniel Day-Lewis walks off stage mid-performance of the National Theatre’s production of Hamlet, forcing it to suspend production, director Richard Eyre asks Charleson to take over.
He takes it, even while he’s dying of AIDS, and against the advice of Dr. Margaret Johnson (Olivia Colman, of Wicked Little Letters), who tells him straight away that the run will shorten what’s left. He does it anyway, and gives twenty-four now-historic performances.
Scott has played Hamlet himself in around 150 West End performances. He’s called it an Olympian task, and that knowledge gives his work here an unusual precision. He dropped real weight for the role, and the frailty is right there on him. The engine underneath never dims. He’s said he had to unlearn his Hamlet in order to perform Charleson’s. There are layers everywhere. David Rintoul, Charleson’s actual best friend, plays the actor playing the Ghost of Hamlet‘s father. It could feel like a stunt, but it never does. Elsinore keeps finding ways for Shakespeare’s meditation on mortality and legacy to mirror the life happening around it.
Stephen Beresford’s script does something I didn’t see coming. He builds an AIDS story in the shape of a sports movie. Montages, training, a clock, a crowd. On paper that should be tasteless. In the theater it’s what keeps the film from becoming two hours of grief.
The supporting cast is stacked. Billie Piper plays Patsy Pollock, the casting director and best friend who hands him his pain medication with one hand and shoves him out the door to rehearsal with the other. May we all get one of those friends in our lives. Colman gives Dr. Johnson an icy professionalism that thaws, and she’s in top form. Johnny Flynn plays Richard Eyre, the director facing an impossible call about his friend. Juliet Stevenson knew the real Charleson, and it shows.
Andrew Scott in Elsinore (Courtesy of TIFF)
What got me most is how funny Elsinore is, and I found that I cried easily at the light parts. There’s a stretch where Charleson pushes a younger patient, Nicholas (Joe Locke, of Heartstopper), to choreograph a dance for the ward. They do it to an Ethel Merman disco version of “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” It’s ridiculous, and it’s one of the best scenes in the film. The laughter doesn’t soften what’s happening. It makes the people living through it feel more alive.
Cinematographer Mike Eley shoots handheld, on his shoulder or an Easyrig. Helen Scott’s design builds 1989 London without the eighties costume party. The National looms over Charleson like the film’s own Elsinore castle, enormous and cold. Charleson’s body keeps getting smaller. Then he performs, and the scale flips. The man fills the place, and Scott masterfully sketches that out for us with increasingly desperate soliloquies written hundreds of years ago that eerily mirror the fear many faced then and are still fighting now.
That’s where it gets past the tragic biopic. It’s about what an artist leaves behind when the body carrying the art is running out of time. Charleson lived through the AIDS crisis while so many queer lives were lost, hidden or misread. The film gives him what history usually denies people who die young: He’s remembered for the life he lived, not the way it ended.
By tradition, actors at the National bang on the dressing-room windows for a peer who’s finished a run. The producers filled those windows with people who knew Charleson and actors who’ve won the award named for him. Elsinore asks nothing of you except that you sit in the house and observe. When Scott steps into the light, you stop watching a man die and start seeing an actor live as hard as he can, for as long as he can. A thousand people in Toronto stood and stayed standing long enough to say the room agreed.
Elsinore (Tiff 2026): Movie Plot & Recap
Synopsis:
In 1989 London, a gifted actor dying of AIDS takes the title role in Hamlet at the National Theatre, knowing the run will cost him time he does not have.
Pros:
Andrew Scott gives a career performance, and the ovation in the room was earned
A stacked bench where Piper, Colman, Flynn, Stevenson and Mullan all land
Framing an AIDS story like a sports movie should not work, and it completely does
Cons:
Not an easy watch, and it never softens where it’s heading
The understudies who covered Charleson’s missed nights go unexplored, and that’s a story too
A couple of montages lean hard on the underdog framework
Elsinore was screened at TIFF on September 14, 2026. The film will be released in US theatres in December 2026 and in UK & Irish cinemas on January 29, 2027.