The Scottish play is Shakespeare's leanest tragedy, barely 2500 lines as against Lear's 3500 and Hamlet's 4000. Yet this dark and bloodsoaked version, by Australian director Kurzel, uses barely half of them.
What's most striking about the film, which will doubtless annoy textual purists but will surely excite movie fans, is how eerily quiet it is. Lines that are traditionally bellowed - the tyrant king's rave at Banquo's ghost, say, or Macduff's "Turn, hellhound, turn!", or every word of the witches - are uttered with a restraint that makes the menace almost palpable.
Other action is stripped to the bare bones: Macduff's wife and children are not slaughtered, but captured in a 90-line chase scene reduced to a single repeated word. Then, when Macbeth burns them all at the stake, the script gives Lady Macduff a line of Malcolm's from the next scene, which with hideous aptness, speaks of how the tyrant's name "blisters our tongues".
The leanness of the script is consistent with Kurzel's plain intention to make a Macbeth that is primarily cinematic, and there are flights of cinematic fancy galore.
It opens with the funeral of a Macbeth child and we are invited to conclude he loses a teenage son in the following battle. This does more than just make sense of Lady Macbeth's later "I have given suck ... " speech: it makes the murderous couple's actions part of a monstrously twisted attempt to ensure their line's survival.
