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Re-reading Akira Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well, a Japanese film adaptation of Hamlet: content, genre and context

In this article, I understand The Bad Sleep Well according to a schema of content, genre and context. First, the film takes the play's content – namely, the murder of Old Hamlet – as its point of departure, seeing this as one of a series of crimes that illuminates the dangers of a culture of deference and widespread corporate corruption. By mimicking the start of Hamlet, I argue, The Bad Sleep Well magnifies the mysteries at the heart of the play, thereby elaborating Shakespearean themes of false appearance and hidden reality. Integral to the process, I suggest, is a deployment of film noir and detective film genres, which are enlisted in such a way as to conjure the contexts of a disillusioned Japan struggling to find a coherent identity in the post-occupation period. The result is a richly multivalent film whose rewriting of Hamlet in bits provides a blueprint for a subsequent generation of filmmakers.