Of every video game that I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into and pulled plenty of all-nighters on with friends over the years, few have as dear a place in my heart as Grand Theft Auto V. The second-bestselling video game of all time’s expansive, detailed and especially violent open world of San Andreas has always been one of endless possibilities.

A feature film being made in the game was probably inevitable after more than a decade since the game’s release, but I never expected something as innovative and moving as “Grand Theft Hamlet.” Here is a film that effortlessly captures the feeling of killing time and losing yourself in the limitless, unpredictable world of GTA. Even further, it’s a film that totally transcends the graphic crudeness of the game to become a genuinely profound statement on what it means to devote time and passion to creating a work of art.

The film begins in January of 2021 as the United Kingdom is entering its third lockdown. West End actor Sam Crane and assistant director Mark Oosterveen are unemployed, isolated and indulging in the mindless violence of GTA Online.

One day, the pair stumble upon an amphitheater nestled in the middle of the game’s map and joke about staging a live play in a world where one can’t catch Covid-19.

But when Crane performs a soliloquy from William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” for one player who responds to their invite, the idea quickly becomes an obsession for the two men. Armed with the in-game camera, Crane’s wife and documentarian Pinny Grylls joins their online server to chronicle the process of staging Shakespeare’s masterpiece in the chaos of the virtual world.

If you find the idea of watching a film that’s more or less identical to something you could find on YouTube or Twitch absurd, don’t worry. Crane and Grylls do too.

So much of what makes “Grand Theft Hamlet” entertaining to watch comes from how unpredictable the world of GTA Online can be. It’s the motley crew of performers they slowly recruit — some who have past experience, like Overwatch voice actor Jen Cohn, others who miraculously stumble into the show like the alien avatar and MVP of the film ParTebMosMir — that grounds the film and creates a truly uplifting sense of community.

Despite its conventional narrative structure, the inventive visual language that the film captures within the digital textures and constant anarchy of the game is surprisingly beautiful. Sunrises over empty landscapes, establishing shots of office buildings and reaction shots of NPCs are made strikingly cinematic.

Watching this film in a theater made the sequences in which seemingly raw screen recordings with the HUD (heads-up display, including the minimap and a constant kill-feed) on full display especially surreal and hilarious.

Even funnier and more surreal, especially when watching the film in a theater, are the seemingly raw screen recordings that make up most of the film in which the HUD and a constant kill-feed are on full display.

As the show struggles to go on, the real world mental, financial and marital struggles of the pandemic start to leak into the game. Some of these sequences of back-and-forth banter can feel a little too staged and self-serious in their execution, but the unplanned accidents that constantly interrupt the production more than make up for it.

Moments like random players showing up and killing everyone, the entire cast falling off a blimp mid-scene and the play’s audience doing silly emotes in the background of the final performance make the film the most hilarious work of art I’ve seen reflect the unpredictability of the pandemic. It’s an essential reminder that, as Crane shouts while his avatar gets gunned down by a SWAT helicopter during the filming of their casting call, “you can’t stop art, motherf—ers!”

At its frequent best, “Grand Theft Hamlet” is a hysterical and deeply inspiring film about the creative spirit and community that can be found in the craziest of places and prevail through the bleakest of times. I can only hope that someone stages “Macbeth” in Fortnite next.

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