‘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 film Looking for Richard, Al Pacino claimed that the works of William Shakespeare are about “how we think and feel today”, and used Richard III, theplaywright’s drama of twisted, self-consuming despotism, as evidence. German director Burhan Qurbani is equally enamoured of this dark political fable, so much so that he has recast the contorted English king as a resentful, power-hungry woman vying with her brothers and a rival gang for control of today’s Berlin underworld.

Style trumps coherence

But contemporary relevance and a contemporary setting are two different things, and while it has the latter in great stylish measure, No Beast. So Fierce. (a title taken from a line in the play) struggles to make a case for why we need this spin on Richard III, right here, right now. Despite the Shakespearian hook, this wild, loose and overlong adaptation, which smuggles in topical lines that the Bard never wrote (among them “Foreign blood oils German unity”), will likely be seen as an intriguing curio outside of its homeland. 

German-born, of Afghan origins, Qurbani has made the pressures of immigration, integration and tribal identity a theme of all four of his features, and this is the second in a row, after his 2020 adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, to address that theme through the modernisation of a canonical literary text. It soon, however, loses this anchor in its sprawling extent and maximalist desire to make every scene a showstopper. Shot in Poland (warmly and atmospherically, by Qurbani’s go-to DoP Yoshi Heimrath), No Beast. So Fierce. exudes visual confidence, right down to some striking make-up and hair design. And yet  it drags, especially in its final hour. 

High points include the performance of Syrian actor Kenda Hmeidan, who moved to Berlin from her native Damascus in 2016. Hmeidan snarls and caresses her way into a role that leans not on prosthetics – unlike Shakespeare’s Richard of York, her Rashida York suffers from no physical impairment – but on a dazzling command of body language. The unconsidered daughter of the York clan, which has fingers in all the usual underworld pies on both sides of the law, Rashida has twice the drive and ambition of her brothers Imad (Mehdi Nebbou) and Ghazi (Camill Jammal), pumped-up ciphers who struggle with addiction and low self-esteem. This is not the only thing Qurbani’s film has in common with HBO media dynasty series Succession – the other is Israeli Arab actress Hiam Abbass. Here she plays Rashida’s doting former nanny (a character found nowhere in Shakespeare’s play), who has since become her chief enforcer and hit-woman.

After a theatrical origin-story prologue set somewhere in the war-ravaged Middle East, the film reveals its strengths and weaknesses in its opening present-day scene, in which Rashida plays the advocate in a raucous courtroom defending her loser of a brother, Ghazi, against the rival Lancaster clan. No matter that no German court would appoint a sister as her brother’s defence lawyer, or that Rashida’s career as a barrister evaporates once the scene is wrapped. Style trumps coherence here and in so much that will follow. Sometimes, admittedly, that’s enough. A choreographed dream sequence that begins when Rashida’s leather-clad biker-girl lieutenants come to a halt and shake their hair loose from their helmets, though as brazenly irrelevant as a music video insert, wings it on sheer chutzpah.

The strongest suit in this adaptation of Shakespeare’s War of the Roses drama by Qurbani and his fellow screenwriter Enis Maci is their transposition of an intensely male world into a contemporary ethnic setting where it’s the women – sidelined culturally and socially – who end up making all the important power plays. The film’s other stand-out performances are those 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 in which Richard III bullies, cajoles and dirty-talks Anne of Lancaster into marrying him despite having murdered her father and previous husband is transformed here into a woman-on-woman seduction scene set in a cavernous morgue. It’s positively Lynchian - but then again, so was Shakespeare’s original).