"Denmark is a prison" according to Hamlet, and as author and general smart person John Green points out, he is absolutely right. Hamlet's Denmark is a surveillance state in which everybody is being watched by someone, and sometimes seeming to be mad is the only safe choice. That's even more true of the Kashmir seen in Haider (2014); this is Kashmir in the nineties, dominated by insurgents, military checkpoints, and civilian disappearances. It's a world where an anonymous tip can be deadlier than ear poison.
Let's take it from the top. Haider (Shahid Kapoor) is a college student who returns home to find that his father, Doctor Hilal Meer (Narendra Jha), has disappeared, taken away by the army, who blew up the house for good measure. Ghazala (Tabu), Haider's mother, has taken refuge with her brother-in-law Khurram (Lay Kay Menon), and they are entirely too close for Haider's comfort.
Rather than mope around his uncle's house, Haider scours the country looking for his father, helped by his childhood sweetheart Arshia (Shraddha Kapoor), and later joining protests with the family members of other disappeared. Khurram, meanwhile, uses his brother's disappearance to further his own political ambitions, while Ghazala tries desperately to reconnect with her son.
And then Arshia is contacted by Roohdar (Irffan Khan), who claims to have a message for Haider from his father. The message is, as you might guess, "avenge my death." According to Roohdar, Khurram was responsible for Hilal's arrest. Hilal and Roohdar were cellmates, and so Roohdar was present when Khurram arranged to have them both murdered. To prove his claims, Roohdar directs Haider to his father's grave, and then, since this is a tragedy, everything goes to hell. There are soliloquies (so many soliloquies), antic dispositions, a big musical number which is the thing wherein to catch the conscience of the . . . lawyer with military connections turned powerful politician, and a climactic and astonishingly bloody gunfight in a graveyard.
This is not Hamlet the play, it's an adaptation, and that means there are differences. The treatment of the female characters is markedly better; Arshia isn't just Ophelia, she also fills in for Horatio, which means she displays a lot more agency than her Shakespearean counterpart; she is Haider's partner, rather than someone to be lied to and avoided. Like Ophelia, Arshia is present for Haider's big "To be or not to be" speech, but unlike Ophelia she gets to interrupt him to ask what the hell he's talking about.
Ghazala, meanwhile, is basically a tragic hero in her own right, She is torn by conflicting loyalties, has an even more complicated relationship with her son than the notoriously complicated Hamlet-Gertrude relationship, and yet remains an active character throughout the film and goes out on her own terms. The entire cast is great, and Shahid Kapoor may well be my favorite cinematic Hamlet, but Tabu is even better. It's an amazing performance.
Haider is also an intensely political film. Haider is not a prince, he's a common man crushed under the weight of an oppressive system. The film's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern analogues are obsessed with Bollywood actor Salman Khan, and the film will sometimes cut between snippets of Khan's goofy nineties movies and the casual brutalization of the people of Kashmir during the same period, including meaningless checkpoints, targeted arrests, torture, and the extrajudicial murder of prisoners. This is not just a meditation on the limits of personal revenge, it asks big questions about how to change a system that has no intention of changing. There are no answers provided.
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