The first section argues that İntikam Meleği and Tardid are distinguished by elaborating different constructions of the Old Hamlet/Ghost figure, which is foregrounded in such a way as to address ideas about the execution of justice, the mission of the Hamletian protagonist and the status of the image. Acknowledging the adaptive process entails a corresponding focus on issues of performance. In the second section, I unpick the political valences of both films’ immersion in performance idioms, identifying the significations of the play-within-the-play in İntikam Meleği and the coded ways in which metaphors of water in Tardid, and Siavash/Hamlet’s photojournalism, intimate resistant ideologies. Even as İntikam Meleği and Tardid conjure expectations about the trajectory of the play, I maintain, they also subject them to scrutiny and reversal. This is nowhere more obvious than in both films’ privileging, via casting or rewriting, of women’s roles: İntikam Meleği’s dynamic female Hamlet, for example, is matched by an equivalently pro-active Mahtab/Ophelia in Tardid, who is granted an agency beyond the constrictions of her Shakespearean equivalent.