TIFF Review: Elsinore Is Overwrought, Shoddily Constructed Awards Bait

It was only a matter of time before Andrew Scott, the Irish actor best known for playing the “Hot Priest” on Fleabag, would set his sights on the highest achievements in his line of work. A well-respected stage and screen performer among his peers, Scott finally gets his big solo showcase in Simon Stone’s Elsinore, where he plays late Scottish actor Ian Charleson, who died of complications from AIDS months after portraying Hamlet on stage. While it’s clear he gives it his all in the role of Charleson, the shoddy construction of Elsinore as a series of poorly edited Andrew Scott sizzle reels makes it impossible to tell how good a performance he gives. This is prime overwrought awards bait, a star vehicle with Stone drunk at the wheel, crashing over and over again to wring out some precious tears from viewers. It’s the kind of “important” film that will dissipate as fast as the pleasantries exchanged between Scott and awards voters at luncheons and cocktails over the coming months.

Elsinore opens with the event that kicks Charleson’s final months into motion: during a 1989 National Theatre production of Hamlet, Daniel Day-Lewis infamously abandoned the title role after a breakdown mid-performance. We then hop back a month earlier to focus on Charleson, still working as an actor while he hides his worsening illness. The opening act establishes Charleson’s annoyance at his success as the lead in 1981’s Chariots of Fire, with Vangelis’ theme song repeatedly popping up to his chagrin (call it a running joke, if you like). It also makes clear his love for stage over film, and his envy of Day-Lewis playing Hamlet. Once the film catches up to its opening scene, theater director Richard Eyre (Johnny Flynn) offers the part to Charleson. It’s the role of a lifetime that unfortunately comes right as Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions appear on his body, which Charleson sees as the beginning of the end.

By this point, Stone and editor Valerio Bonelli deploy an overreliance on montage to zip through the emotional beats of a tragic biopic with the aid of Stefan Gregory’s overbearing score. Sweeping strings and solemn piano chords play as we see Charleson split his time between rehearsals and an AIDS clinic run by a no-nonsense doctor (Olivia Colman), or when he writhes around in agony as his weakening body buckles under the workload. These sequences are vacuous, lazy, tasteless; it shouldn’t require any explanation why the camera panning over bedridden AIDS patients while somber music plays is crass manipulation, even though these kinds of sappy tearjerkers have long inured us to it. 

This hatchet job of jump cuts and montages also does no favors to the ensemble, which defeats the purpose of a film engineered to show off their capital-A acting skills. Scott’s performance as Charleson plays out in fragments, reduced to staccato slop with nothing to ground it save for the score’s barrage of emotional cues. A scene where Charleson gets several clinic patients to perform a dance number with him is chopped so much between reaction shots of patients and Colman sneakily watching through a window that the number becomes borderline incoherent. No moment in Elsinore exists outside of the moment it occurs. Scenes don’t end as much as they evaporate.

Yet Elsinore manages to fret its way to the finish line, hopping around at the pace of someone avoiding sniper fire. Stephen Beresford’s screenplay does due diligence by bringing in the political context of the AIDS pandemic via a subplot with Charleson’s old friend and lover Derek Jarman (David Dawson), who scolds him over a refusal to go public about his illness. In the hands of Stone’s dull direction and Bonelli’s horror-show editing, these moments are no more than perfunctory signposts. We eventually get to the performances of Hamlet, from which we see a few clips of Scott as Charleson on stage until, once again, we’re subjected to a montage that crosscuts between the performance, Charleson in agony, Colman’s doctor thawing her cold heart, and clinic patients celebrating a rave review in the newspaper (Charleson’s run lasted 24 shows before his death weeks after his final bow). 

This attempt to coalesce the final months of Charleson’s life should be an uplifting yet bittersweet celebration of his fighting spirit, and a gesture toward the power of art. Instead the sole gesture is an arm outstretched from the screen, palm open, with but only demand: “Trophy, please.”

Elsinore premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival and opens on November 20.