Close up on an undiluted bowl of water sitting centre stage. Slowly, droplets of thick, red blood fall, blotching the crystal-clear liquid – order turning into crimson chaos.

These are the opening shots in the morose, sparse vision for Shakespeare’s Scotland presented by director Max Webster, first seen at the London’s producing powerhouse the Donmar Warehouse in 2023 before hopping across to the West End last autumn.

Led by David Tennant and Cush Jumbo as the cursed couple who dabble in a spot of regicide, Webster’s revival involved audiences donning headphones, lines being whispered into microphones and given skin-crawling intensity even at the back of the auditorium.

Now in cinemas from 5 February, headphones are out and a newly rendered soundscape is in: it would be logistically impossible to give every cinema-goer a headset after all. Filmed during the Donmar run (so losing some of the refinements present during the follow-up West End season), the sound mix flits between the extreme proximity and wider audio capture, thrusting spectators in and out of characters minds, see-sawing between soliloquy and wider spectacle.

Capture director Tim Van Someren is unafraid to lean into the flexibility the screen format provides: Tennant washing his blood-stained hands in ethereal slow motion, while brooding close-ups give an immediacy unavailable to a live audience. The occasional crane shot, sometimes fluttering overhead, provides a swooping sense of foreboding.

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For the most part, however, this is a fairly unobtrusive capture – the edit bounces between locked wide shots and gimbal mid-shots, occasionally having to resort to fish-eye lenses to capture the expanse of Rosanna Vize’s flat, unfussy white canvas set. It’s left to the warmths and pale iciness of Bruno Poet’s lighting to demarcate scene changes and shifts in tone – as effective here as they were in the theatre. The greatest moments of visual richness therefore come during the red-daubed Witches’ vision in act four, Macbeth descending into a sea of horror, conjured largely through the ensemble’s movement.

As it was in person, the acting is sublime – the endless malleability of Tennant’s expression is even more arresting when shown in close-up, while the scheming of Jumbo’s Lady M is presented with painstaking clarity. Webster makes the smart move to give Jumbo more to do in act four, scene two, amplifying the tragedy of the Macduff family’s murder.