Fair Is Foul and Foul Is Fair: Joel Coen’s Visionary The Tragedy of Macbeth

“When shall we three meet again,” asks the first of the women, “In thunder, lightning, or in rain?” “When the hurlyburly’s done, / When the battle’s lost and won,” responds the second. The eerie, iconic launch to Shakespeare’s 1606 tragedy may also be one of the most screen-ready: at least 38 film adaptations have been produced, the first a 1908 silent short by British American director J. Stuart Blackton.

Across the eras, the ways by which the three witches are corporeally conjured and creatively contextualized often set the tenor of what is to follow. In Roman Polanski’s gritty 1971 version, a pair of hunched, phlegmatic crones intone the opening couplets on an abandoned beach, burying a human hand in the sand, while a third witch, around 30 years old, mutely participates. In Geoffrey Wright’s 2006 Australian rendition set in modern-day Melbourne, a trio of sneering teenage girls chisel out the eyes of Christian cemetery headstones, their prep school uniforms matching in the fog. In Rupert Goold’s 2010 television version for the bbc, the witches appear as hospital nurses attending a wounded soldier in midcentury Eastern Europe; after stopping his heart and tearing it from his chest, they pull down their surgical masks to exchange the 13 lines that comprise the first scene.

In keeping with its stark, hyper-stylized vision, the first shot of the most recent installment of Shakespeare’s infamous “Scottish Play”—Joel Coen’s 2021 The Tragedy of Macbeth—features nothing but four letters against a black background: “when.” Presented in all-caps serif font, this opening preposition comes across as a looming proposition. After the first witch’s query is whispered by an unseen speaker, the second witch’s response follows in guttural, androgynous tones. “Fair is foul and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air,” the voice concludes haltingly, the shot cutting to an all-white screen to the sound of a revolving slide projector. This blank box, in Academy ratio, becomes a clouded sky in which three prophetic ravens circle. The wind softly howls as footsteps appear below in the snow-like sand (the original stage direction for scene 1 is “in the desert”). Banquo (Bertie Carvel) crosses the battlefield.

The “witches” appear at last in human form a few minutes later, channeled via the tiny, tremendous, and often terrifying body of Kathryn Hunter, a 64-year-old English actor best known for her London stage career. “Where hast thou been, sister?” she asks, her wiry frame fetal in the sand. “Killing swine,” she responds to her own question, lowering her voice, a clue that she is playing all three “sisters.” Her twisted torso lifts to face the camera; her long, seemingly double-jointed arms tuck beneath her left haunch, nicked shin bending over her elbow. Merging necromancy with gruesome acrobatics, Hunter’s “Witches” reminds one of both a demonic sprite and Murnau’s Nosferatu—limber and spindly in her black skull cap. She crawls through the sand, a sailor’s thumb between her toes, and delivers the witches’ lines in a different sequence from Shakespeare’s original, lending a scrambled, hallucinatory aspect to their three-part exchange. “The weird sisters, hand in hand,” she chants, flapping her own like wings.

When Macbeth (Denzel Washington) and Banquo come across her lone figure, they are as mystified as we are. “Speak, if you can: what are you?” asks the doomed general. Two identical reflections appear in a pool of water in front of Witches’ cloaked form, inversions of her dark, triangular silhouette. Three voices declare at once, “All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!” Then the triplet figures lift their elbows and, as birds, screech into the sky, their curse mistaken for triumph.

Much has been made about Denzel Washington’s and Frances McDormand’s masterful portrayals of the play’s eponymous villains, along with the impressive ensemble of veteran and emerging actors who fuel its diegesis. No matter the hype, however warranted, about the A-list actors in this...