‘No Beast. So Fierce.’ review: Richard III moves to modern Berlin, and becomes Rashida

Dir: Burhan Qurbani. Germany/Poland/France. 2025. 142mins

In his 1996 movie In search of Richard, Al Pacino claimed that the works of William Shakespeare are about “how we expect and really feel at this time”, and used Richard III, theplaywright’s drama of twisted, self-consuming despotism, as proof. German director Burhan Qurbani is equally enamoured of this darkish political fable, a lot in order that he has recast the contorted English king as a resentful, power-hungry girl vying together with her brothers and a rival gang for management of at this time’s Berlin underworld.

Fashion trumps coherence

However modern relevance and a up to date setting are two various things, and whereas it has the latter in nice fashionable measure, No Beast. So Fierce. (a title taken from a line within the play) struggles to make a case for why we want this spin on Richard III, proper right here, proper now. Regardless of the Shakespearian hook, this wild, free and overlong adaptation, which smuggles in topical strains that the Bard by no means wrote (amongst them “Overseas blood oils German unity”), will seemingly be seen as an intriguing curio outdoors of its homeland. 

German-born, of Afghan origins, Qurbani has made the pressures of immigration, integration and tribal id a theme of all 4 of his options, and that is the second in a row, after his 2020 adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, to handle that theme via the modernisation of a canonical literary textual content. It quickly, nonetheless, loses this anchor in its sprawling extent and maximalist want to make each scene a showstopper. Shot in Poland (warmly and atmospherically, by Qurbani’s go-to DoP Yoshi Heimrath), No Beast. So Fierce. exudes visible confidence, proper all the way down to some hanging make-up and hair design. And but  it drags, particularly in its remaining hour. 

Excessive factors embody the efficiency of Syrian actor Kenda Hmeidan, who moved to Berlin from her native Damascus in 2016. Hmeidan snarls and caresses her method into a job that leans not on prosthetics – not like Shakespeare’s Richard of York, her Rashida York suffers from no bodily impairment – however on a stunning command of physique language. The unconsidered daughter of the York clan, which has fingers in all the same old underworld pies on each side of the legislation, Rashida has twice the drive and ambition of her brothers Imad (Mehdi Nebbou) and Ghazi (Camill Jammal), pumped-up ciphers who wrestle with habit and low shallowness. This isn’t the one factor Qurbani’s movie has in widespread with HBO media dynasty collection Succession – the opposite is Israeli Arab actress Hiam Abbass. Right here she performs Rashida’s doting former nanny (a personality discovered nowhere in Shakespeare’s play), who has since turn out to be her chief enforcer and hit-woman.

After a theatrical origin-story prologue set someplace within the war-ravaged Center East, the movie reveals its strengths and weaknesses in its opening present-day scene, through which Rashida performs the advocate in a raucous courtroom defending her loser of a brother, Ghazi, in opposition to the rival Lancaster clan. Regardless of that no German courtroom would appoint a sister as her brother’s defence lawyer, or that Rashida’s profession as a barrister evaporates as soon as the scene is wrapped. Fashion trumps coherence right here and in a lot that can comply with. Typically, admittedly, that’s sufficient. A choreographed dream sequence that begins when Rashida’s leather-clad biker-girl lieutenants come to a halt and shake their hair free from their helmets, although as overtly irrelevant as a music video insert, wings it on sheer chutzpah.

The strongest go well with on this adaptation of Shakespeare’s Battle of the Roses drama by Qurbani and his fellow screenwriter Enis Maci is their transposition of an intensely male world into a up to date ethnic setting the place it’s the ladies – sidelined culturally and socially – who find yourself making all of the necessary energy performs. The movie’s different stand-out performances are these of Verena Altenberger as Rashida’s ethnically German sister-in-law Elisabet and Mona Zarreh Hoshyari Khah as Ghanima, the rival Lancastrian widow she lusts after.

The magnificently sinister Shakespearian scene through which Richard III bullies, cajoles and dirty-talks Anne of Lancaster into marrying him regardless of having murdered her father and former husband is remodeled right here right into a woman-on-woman seduction scene set in a cavernous morgue. It’s positively Lynchian – however then once more, so was Shakespeare’s authentic).