Film

Macbeth

Justin Kurzel's Macbeth trades Shakespeare's usual candlelit stateliness for mud, blood and slow-motion carnage. Fassbender plays the Thane as a shell-shocked soldier already fraying before the witches even speak; Cotillard's Lady Macbeth is quieter and colder than most. It's gorgeous, brutal, and more interested in dread and atmosphere than clean verse-speaking — best for viewers who want tragedy as psychological horror rather than a faithful classroom text.

TMDb rating6.4

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The Tragedy of Macbeth2021

The purest head-to-head: same play, told in stark black-and-white soundstage artifice, with Denzel Washington's Macbeth curdling from soldier to something haunted and Frances McDormand icy and exact as his wife.

But The theatrical, boxed-in set design and slower rhythm can feel closer to a filmed stage production than cinema.

The Tragedy of Macbeth poster

The Northman2022

Same DNA as Kurzel's film — prophecy, murdered kings, a queasy wife pushing her husband toward vengeance — but rebuilt as a howling Viking revenge epic full of mud, ritual and berserker fury.

But Leans further into myth and spectacle than psychology; if you wanted interior torment over battle-axes, this trades some of that away.

The Northman poster

Ran1985

Kurosawa's late masterpiece takes King Lear into feudal Japan for the same scale of betrayal, madness and war Kurzel chases — vast battle sequences shot like moving paintings, grief as spectacle.

But It's a different Shakespeare play entirely, nearly three hours long, and its formal Noh-inflected performances take adjustment.

Ran poster

The wildcard

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Throne of Blood1957

It's a direct adaptation of the same play, decades earlier and in a wholly different culture — proof the story survives translation into any era or tongue.

Kurosawa moved the exact same ambition-murder-guilt machinery into feudal Japan decades before Kurzel, staging it with Noh-theater stylization, an arrow-riddled climax, and a fog-choked castle that feels genuinely cursed.

But Black-and-white, subtitled, and performed in a deliberately theatrical register that can feel alienating if you want naturalism.

Throne of Blood poster
More like this (8)

There Will Be Blood2007

No witches, no crown — just a man's naked ambition metastasizing into total isolation, anchored by one of the great unraveling performances in American film.

But It swaps political tragedy for character study; if you wanted the supernatural dread of prophecy, it isn't here.

There Will Be Blood poster

Hamlet1996

Branagh's full-text, four-hour production remains the gold standard for hearing Shakespeare's language given room to breathe, with a starry ensemble committing completely to every soliloquy and swordfight.

But It's a different play about grief and indecision rather than ambition, and the runtime is a real commitment.

Hamlet poster

Richard III1995

Ian McKellen's charismatic villain-protagonist claws his way to the throne through murder and manipulation, the action relocated to a chillingly plausible fascist 1930s England.

But Its sardonic, knowing tone and direct-to-camera asides are almost comic — a very different register from Macbeth's dread.

Richard III poster

Lady Macbeth2016no page yet

The title is a deliberate provocation: Florence Pugh's trapped Victorian bride is just as cold, calculating and willing to kill for freedom as her namesake, in a ferocious lead performance.

But It isn't actually Shakespeare's story — different plot, different century, no witches — so don't expect the play.

Taboo2017

Tom Hardy broods through a filthy, occult-tinged 19th-century revenge story soaked in the same paranoia, ambition and moral rot that Kurzel finds in Scotland's fog.

But The plotting can meander and its supernatural elements stay frustratingly vague rather than resolving into anything.

Taboo poster

Rob Roy1995

Set in the same Highland landscape of clan honor, betrayal and brutal swordplay, but played straighter — a heroic historical epic rather than a psychological unraveling.

But It lacks any of the supernatural dread or moral ambiguity that makes Macbeth's fall so unsettling.

Rob Roy poster

Scarface1983

Same engine as Macbeth — seize power through murder, spiral into paranoid isolation, fall — just relocated from a Scottish castle to a Miami mansion, and played as trash instead of tragedy.

Strip away the verse and the witches and you get Tony Montana: a man who murders his way to power and is consumed by the paranoia his own ambition creates.

But It has none of the poetry or moral ambiguity — just cocaine-fuelled excess and gleeful overacting.

Scarface poster

The Death of Stalin2017

Same paranoid court and bloodletting that follow a death and a power vacuum, but tipped into satire — showing how thin the line is between tyranny's horror and its absurdity.

The same terrified inner circle jockeying for power after a leader's death — betrayal, murder and moral collapse — except played as vicious, gasping-for-air farce instead of tragedy.

But If you want the material taken seriously, watching it as comedy might feel like a betrayal of the tone.

The Death of Stalin poster

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