There’s no doubled trouble in the slickly handsome new version of “Macbeth” with Michael Fassbender. The “double, double, toil and trouble” is among the play’s most memorable passages, the one with three witches, a bubbling caldron and an eye of newt. A gang of weird sisters still roams the foggy Scottish moors, periodically speaking in riddles and giving Macbeth the evil eye. Yet the movie mutes the dark magic that swirls in the play, an alteration that itself stirs the pot, complicating the question of Macbeth’s freedom, his will and his guilt.

As with every play, the interpretation’s the thing. The director Justin Kurzel, working from a script by Jacob Koskoff, Todd Louiso and Michael Lesslie, lights a smoldering scene with a broodingly dark palette, verdant hills and vales, and the pale, beautiful face of a dead child on a funeral pyre. Death haunts this place, and soon Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis, is leading his troops to victory on the battlefield, the arena that Mr. Kurzel loves best here. Similarly to what Steven Spielberg did in “Saving Private Ryan” (and the Wachowskis did in “The Matrix”), Mr. Kurzel periodically slows down the action, allowing every drop of blood and bit of mud to linger.