This article focuses on Svend Gade's film adaptation of Hamlet (1921), a silent movie in which actress Asta Nielsen plays the Dane as a heterosexual woman forced to masquerade as a man. Her repressed femininity, which is invisible to the other characters but obvious to the audience, seemingly reinforces sexist clichés by serving as an explanation of Hamlet's identity crisis and tragic passivity. However, it simultaneously portrays Hamlet as an ideal woman, whose androgyny makes her both sexually alluring and socially subversive. Thanks to camera movement and Asta Nielsen's skillful shifts from masculine to feminine body language, the movie undermines an essentialist view of gender identity by suggesting it may rest in the eye of the beholder.