Blood and guts and the Bard

VERILY, there is the rub, sirrah.

Dost thou change the Bard’s lyrical text and replace it with more guts, gore and general mayhem for a modern audience? Or shouldst thou remain true to the original play and ignore Hollywood hype?

Well, the Scottish play bares its teeth and draws blood in Australian director Justin Kurzel’s muscular and unflinching adaptation that accentuates the carnage as the doomed title character is undone by paternal grief and naked ambition.

This Macbeth is rugged and raw, stripped bare of some of Shakespeare’s lyrical text for the sake of dramatic expediency and visual spectacle. Purists may gnash their teeth at some of the alterations in Jacob Koskoff, Todd Louiso and Michael Lesslie’s script.

The film opens with a funeral rather than the meeting with the weird sisters, and Lady Macbeth (Marion Cotillard) is a brittle porcelain doll, likely to crack at the slightest emotional jolt, rather than the demented dynamo behind her husband’s ascent to the throne.

Kurzel chooses to linger on the slow-motion cut and thrust of swords scything through flesh in expertly staged battle sequences that emphasize the title character’s credentials as a fearless warrior.

Michael Fassbender is front and centre throughout as the Thane of Glamis, whose encounter with a quartet of prophetic hags sets him on his ill-fated course to self-annihilation.

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are inconsolable at the loss of their son.

On the battlefields, the Thane encounters a trio of witches (Lynn Kennedy, Seylan Baxter, Kayla Fallon) and a child (Amber Rissmann), who foretell his rise through the ranks and coronation at the expense of King Duncan (David Thewlis).

Fassbender delivers a mesmerising lead performance of snarling intensity that overwhelms everyone else on screen, not least Cotillard as his wife in mourning, who doesn’t always seem comfortable with the iambic pentameter.

It may be Macbeth, Jim, but not as we know it.