Watching Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth is like seeing a stage play on the big screen. The environments are built like sets, and while they evoke the eerie vastness and emptiness of the Scottish moors, you always get the sense that the world stops at the edge of the screen like it’s the proscenium arch of a stage, rather than extending beyond the edges of the current shot. Even the lighting frequently evokes a spotlight—Banquo’s soliloquy is delivered, at times, almost through the fourth wall (as if addressing a live audience) after Banquo enters a circle of white light on an otherwise pitch-black screen. While certainly cinematic in scope, the film is yet in conversation with its theatrical roots.

In translating Macbeth from page to screen, however, one thing must necessarily be different: length. At two and a half hours or more, Shakespeare plays sit just on the edge of too long for a movie, so the filmmakers’ decisions on what to cut—or keep—can bend the interpretation of the story in different directions. Though each adaptation of Macbeth preserves different parts of the narrative, there is one scene that is almost universally cut. Act 4, Scene 3 seems, to be fair, an odd hitch in the story, taking us away from the downward spiral of the Macbeths and pausing the escalation toward war in favor of a beat in which Malcolm—heir apparent to the throne of Scotland—tests the loyalty of Macduff, the Thane of Fife. It is easy to cut this scene, focusing instead on the Macbeths’ drama and allowing Malcolm and Macduff to return to Scotland at the climax of the film as if they have never been anything but determined to reclaim the throne. But it is a far more significant scene than it may, at first, appear.

Macbeth is one of those stories that everyone raves about, that most of us studied at some point in school—at every turn it is a work that should blow us away. But while watching such an honored and successful man self-sabotage his way to notoriety and destruction is eerie, I often leave the movie theater after a Macbeth adaptation feeling like the full weight of it didn’t really land with me.

Now, Act 4 Scene 3 doesn’t satisfy this disappointment; I don’t think all would be right in the world if it were simply added back in. But it encapsulates the larger political impact of Macbeth’s actions that can often be overlooked in favor of the psychological drama. Macbeth tells the story not only of one man’s tragic downfall, but of how that resonates through his entire community; Macbeth’s actions threaten to shatter the trust of Scotland’s ruling class in the very political order in which they participate, and on which they rely. In the preceding scene we see a conversation between Lady Macduff and her cousin Ross, just before Lady Macduff and her son are murdered. Discussing Macduff’s departure for England and the state of things in Scotland, Ross laments:

But cruel are the times when we are traitors
And do not know ourselves; when we hold rumor
From what we fear, yet know not what we fear,
But float upon a wild and violent sea…

Ross’s description of the fear and uncertainty prevalent in their current political situation is realized by the lengths to which Malcolm goes just to assess Macduff’s loyalty. The words and actions of the thanes of Scotland make clear just how much damage Macbeth has done even to those whom he has not killed, and the potential long-term ramifications if the thanes cannot find a way to trust a potential new king—and vice versa—even after Macbeth has been overthrown.