105 min | R | December 25, 2021 | A24
Joel Coen strips Macbeth down to a bare soundstage and shoots it in stark black and white. Denzel Washington plays a Scottish general who murders his way to a crown. The ambition is the trap.
Macbeth is a Scottish general who wins a battle and meets three witches on the road home. They tell him he will be king. His wife hears the prophecy and decides to make it true. Joel Coen casts the Macbeths older than the play usually allows, and that single choice reorders the whole tragedy. This is not a story about young ambition. It is a story about people who have run out of time and choose to murder their way to a crown they will not live to enjoy.
Denzel Washington plays Macbeth as a soldier who reasons his way into murder and then cannot reason his way out. He delivers the soliloquies as private arguments, quiet and rapid, a man talking himself past his own conscience. Frances McDormand plays Lady Macbeth with a flat, practical certainty that curdles into horror. She is not seductive. She is efficient, and the efficiency is what breaks her. Kathryn Hunter plays all three witches as a single contorted body, folding her limbs into impossible angles and croaking the prophecies through a throat that sounds like wet stone.
Joel Coen directs and writes alone here, and the absence of his brother shows in the severity. Bruno Delbonnel shoots in high-contrast black and white that drains the world down to fog, shadow, and hard geometric light. The production design builds Scotland on a soundstage as a set of bare arches and endless gray floors, a place that looks like a thought instead of a country. Coen stages the action against blank walls and pooling shadow, and the artificiality is the point. The castle is a mind. The sound design fills the silence with cawing birds and dripping water until the quiet itself feels guilty.
This is the most controlled Macbeth on film. Coen treats the play as a chamber piece about guilt and time, and he refuses the spectacle that usually drowns it. The danger of the approach is coldness. The soundstage abstraction keeps the blood at arm’s length, and the precision sometimes reads as airless. The central performances supply the heat the design withholds. Two old people decide to damn themselves for a crown, and the film watches them do it without blinking.