Together in electric dreams: "Grand Theft Hamlet" and "The Remarkable Life of Ibelin"

If you're anything like me, you'll have spent the past few weeks wondering whether it might be best if we collectively power down the Internet over the next four years, the better to reset the world, hush the loudmouths, trolls and tech bros, and allow for some form of sanity to prevail anew. Yet two new documentaries offer a case for the defence of the life lived online, not least that it can arm creatives with a whole new set of storytelling tools. In January 2021, as the UK entered into its third lockdown, two out-of-work actors - faced with the abundant leisure time that followed from the shuttering of theatres - met up online for one of their regular games of Grand Theft Auto. After many hours of standard GTA business - including shooting a valet, stealing a car and being pursued at high speed by the police - the pair, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, arrived at a new mission between themselves: to stage a performance of Hamlet at a vast outdoor arena they'd stumbled across within the game, recruiting fellow gamers to fill the other roles. As directed by Crane with his partner Pinny Grylls, the film that resulted from this diversion, Grand Theft Hamlet, can legitimately lay claim to being a documentary unlike any other, in that everything we see on screen has been captured within the world of the game; its subjects are characters composed of often alarmingly jerky pixels who move in ways less predictable than either flesh-and-blood human beings or the avatars in Pixar movies. Everything we hear has been recorded through a headset, cueing the sort of WTF commentary you'd otherwise only happen across watching a young nephew playing Fortnite. All the world's a stage, all its men and women literally players, bashing away remorselessly at the A and B buttons, pausing between couplets to take generous slurps of energy drink.

For all its digitised novelty, GTH is actually telling an old, familiar story: that of the grassroots community theatre project, in which an unlikely ensemble of untested performers gather to put on a show in the face of unexpected obstacles and setbacks. (Consider it a pixellated Sing Sing.) Some of the syntax is exactly the same: establishing shots of Vice City offer pause for reflection, while also highlighting the game's scope and artistry. It's just that matters tend to get more chaotic whenever people enter the shot. Someone auditions in the guise of a hip-thrusting alien. A snotnosed 13-year-old player, oblivious to this project's lofty artistic aspirations, pulls out a shotgun and drops one of the directors. None of the avatars' mouths exactly matches what they're saying, which looks doubly odd when they're spouting the same iambic pentameter Gielgud and Olivier specialised in. Certain elements left me sceptical: arguments between the friends, and between husband and wife, look and sound like contrivances designed to trick up the jeopardy. (We are dealing with actors, after all.) Even at a mere 90 minutes, the film left me headachey: if the absence of fresh air and sunlight doesn't do for you, the relentless chatter and corkscrewing in-game camera movements will. There were, it transpires, good reasons our parents advised us to switch those screens off and go play outside; this is game-as-movie (or movie-as-game) in runthrough mode, its rough edges and tactical errors (a tumble off a tall building, an aborted getaway by plane) left in as both lesson and source of potential amusement. Still, there is something stirring in the bigger picture of folks fumbling their way towards Shakespearian truths in dark times, striving to enable something creative within a framework that more commonly favours destruction. And it's another useful record of the quiet mania of lockdown: folks doing mad shit in the virtual realm, because there was nothing else to do in the real world. Obvious sequel ideas present themselves. Call of Duty Coriolanus. Doom Titus Andronicus.

Benjamin Ree's The Remarkable Life of Ibelin goes deeper, and finds rich visual and emotional texture in the contrast between lived and virtual reality. Its backstory is set out using home video footage that represents drab, sorry actuality. There was once a boy called Mats Steen, born in the late 1980s in Norway to loving parents. Mats, we learn, was not long for this world, born as he was with Duchenne, one of those muscle-wasting syndromes that seem terribly arbitrary and unfair. As the home video ticks by year by year, we witness its effects: already a stumbler as a child, by early adolescence Mats was reliant upon a series of mobility devices that did all the heavy lifting while he grew only thinner and thinner. (One especially vivid shot: trousers flapping like circus tents around painfully tiny ankles.) This frail body finally gave out in 2014, when Mats was just 25, yet as his family was to discover, their boy lived on in the hearts and minds of his fellow gamers - and as Ree's film logs on, leaving the analogue world behind, it gains legs and heft and starts to take flight. Upon Mats' death, his father Robert found his inbox inundated with emails from those his son had encountered online while playing World of Warcraft, one of the few activities he could still take pleasure in as his body disappeared from under him. In this digital sphere, Mats assumed new form as the warrior enshrined in the title: a more robust, self-made figure who was all at once a seeker, a lover and a fighter, a leader of men, and a loyal friend, prone to initiating conversations with "how are you doing?", possibly as this was the question most asked of him offline. The story has an inbuilt poignancy even before Ree cuts back to footage of a stick-thin Mats, courtside in his chair at a tennis match, surrounded by fair-haired, full-bodied Nordic youth, apparently unable to get the girl, save the day or realise his potential in this context. Crucially, however, the film regards this kid not as a martyr or victim, nor especially as a latter-day saint, but a teenager making choices, some misguided or muddled, all recognisably human.

Ree, who did 2020's The Painter and the Thief, shapes up again here as one of modern non-fiction's most patient and diligent storytellers. That earlier film unfolded over several years; this latest makes the process of discovery central to World of Warcraft central to the film, and to the reconstruction of this reconstructed life. Ree turns up not just those home videos and emails, but hundreds of blogposts Mats wrote from his chair, a vast archive of data logging Ibelin's movements and conversations, and - most movingly of all - those fellow players Mats wooed, nurtured, stirred and inspired during his time in this world. These folks, most of whom are now in their twenties or thirties, have been encouraged to set aside any awkwardness and share a memory or two; the picture they collectively paint suggests Mats used the game not only to transcend his own physical limitations (running for miles, say, even before setting out on the prescribed quests) but also international borders, the rules of the game as well as those by which the real world generally abides. It develops, in other words, and for all that Ree deploys the sylvan beauty of World of Warcraft's game mode, his film is finally and firmly about the people who play these games, in a way the proponents of AI, to name one threat to film culture, would struggle to tolerate. More so than Grand Theft Hamlet, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin communicates the appeal of gaming, even to those of us who've long since put down the joypad. As the horizons of the real world close down, limited by the conservatism of those who would control our movements and run that world for the benefit of an elite few, those of the virtual realm seem to open up, expand, beckon. The possibilities here, at least, remain endless.

Grand Theft Hamlet opens in selected cinemas from today; The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is now streaming via Netflix.