Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand star in a brooding The Tragedy of Macbeth

Joel Coen alone directs the stark and showy The Tragedy of Macbeth. With brother Ethan on a break, he has opted for high-end source material. It makes for the kind of project a Coen brothers movie might have once had smirky fun with. What would the hard-boiled studio execs of Barton Fink and Hail, Caesar! think of the director of so much zippy irreverence tackling Shakespeare with the fractionally grand credit, “Written for the screen by Joel Coen”?

Delivering his words are Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth and Denzel Washington as a grey-bearded Macbeth with a warm, tobacco chuckle. Such is the soul to be damned in a staging less furious than flawlessly designed. The movie is black and white and then some, all pristine snow and abyss. Filthy clouds pass over a moon that becomes a spotlight. We strip back to the eerie rudiments of early cinema, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari at Inverness Castle. The mood inside is vivid, corridors haunted by shadows, windows battered by tree limbs.

A film lover like Joel Coen will know that making Macbeth as expressionist horror was a trick already played on screen by Orson Welles in 1948. A cynic might also see a brand-name director indulging their art on the buck of a backer, Apple, that needs movie credibility by association. Both things are true. Still, the aesthetic is a perfect fit for the mood of dread and things askew. A marvel in itself as well. As the castle broods under the cold stars, the film is a celebration of cinema every bit as rich as Steven Spielberg’s recent West Side Story.

The play does less well. The casting of Washington and McDormand, both in their sixties, brings a sense of stifled ambition and generational power grab. But the actual performances — award-winners for sure — feel limited, big on the soliloquies, ho-hum otherwise. Do they really seem like murderers? They do not. The kick is in the mere novelty of hearing movie stars deliver the speeches, like watching a cat skateboard.

The real coup comes elsewhere, Kathryn Hunter astonishing as all three witches. A sui generis physical performer, limbs contorted, speaking in guttural singsong: her one-woman Weird Sisters demand to be seen. She perches high above Washington’s Macbeth and Coen’s too, up with the crows and the heavens.

★★★☆☆

In cinemas from December 26 and on Apple TV Plus from January 14