A tale told by a master filmmaker, full of silence and shadow, signifying everything.
Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth isn’t just an adaptation of Shakespeare’s brutal game of thrones – it’s a distillation of its essence, paring it down to a spectral nightmare of doomed inevitability. Working solo for the first time, Coen carves the Scottish Play into something stripped of any excess; a film that feels less like a conventional period piece and more like a feverish, expressionist hallucination. The result is a Macbeth that trades gothic grandeur for grim fatalism, a cinematic séance where ambition and destiny circle each other like duelling phantoms in the fog.
Denzel Washington’s Macbeth is a study in a slow, unpreventable fall. Gone is the restless ambition of a younger warrior – instead, Washington plays him as a battle-weary veteran, one whose march toward the throne feels more like the slow pull of a noose tightening than a grasp for power. There’s an eerie calm to his delivery, an internalised resignation that suggests he understands, on some level, that he is merely playing his part in a design he cannot alter. It’s a fascinating, measured performance, one that leans into the idea of fate rather than fire, the character’s descent into tyranny feeling less like unchecked greed and more like the slow, dreadful realisation that he was always doomed to this end.
Frances McDormand’s Lady Macbeth shares that same air of quiet calculation; the archetype of the ruthless instigator is softened here, her persuasion of her husband feels less like venomous ambition and more like pragmatic resolve, as if she is ushering him toward an outcome she has already accepted as preordained. McDormand is, as ever, exceptional, playing Lady Macbeth not as a firebrand but as a woman who knows she must be steely because her husband is already breaking beneath the burden of what lies ahead. The chemistry between her and Washington, cerebral rather than sensual, speaks of a union built on shared pain rather than passion, making their inescapable unravelling all the more tragic.
The film’s most arresting invention is its take on the Weird Sisters, and here Coen goes for something truly uncanny. Kathryn Hunter doesn’t just play the witches – she embodies something more amorphous, a contorted spectre of malevolence, her body twisted into inhuman shapes, her voice slithering between rasps and whispers. Gone is the trope of three hags murmuring over a cauldron; instead, this is a singular, omnipresent force, a nightmare made flesh, a harbinger of doom rather than an agent of manipulation. It’s one of the most unsettling renditions of the witches ever put to screen.
The film’s aesthetic is stark, high-contrast, and deliberately artificial. Shot in austere black-and-white by Bruno Delbonnel, every frame is composed with ruthless precision, creating a world of harsh shadows and jagged geometry. The Tragedy Of Macbeth isn’t set in a medieval castle or a mist-drenched moor, but in a liminal space somewhere between theatre and screen. The influence of German Expressionism looms large – distorted perspectives, elongated corridors, light and shadow sculpting the landscape as much as the sets themselves. There’s no attempt at historical realism here; this is Shakespeare via nightmare logic, a void where fate plays itself out like a horror film written in iambic pentameter.
Coen’s approach to the text is just as stark, pruning Shakespeare’s script into something lean and propulsive. Scenes that traditionally offer a tonal counterpoint – the Porter’s scene, for instance – are kept brief, almost cursory, maintaining the film’s unrelenting atmosphere. The result is a Macbeth that moves with a terrible inevitability, each moment tightening the noose. Coen leans fully into the idea that Macbeth is not simply making choices but marching toward a fate that was sealed before he ever set foot on the battlefield.
If there’s a criticism to be made, it’s that The Tragedy Of Macbeth is almost too precise. The stylisation, the abstraction, the sheer meticulousness of the filmmaking creates a slight sense of removal. It’s a film of icy deliberation rather than visceral fury, and while every performance is impeccable, there’s a chill to the execution that holds the audience at sword arm’s length and occasionally you might long for the blood and thunder and raw, messy violence of a more traditional take.
Still, as a vision of Macbeth, this is as distinctive as they come. Coen strips the play to its bare bones, presenting a tragedy that feels timeless, spectral, as if it has always existed in the shadows, waiting to be whispered into the dark. Shakespeare’s text remains, but the way it haunts the screen feels new – a Tragedy Of Macbeth not of kings and castles, but of shades and echoes, power and predestination, all playing out within an expressionist void where fate waits with open arms and daggers drawn.
