I love Wes Anderson’s most recent Netflix releases. As my colleague Andrew King has described in detail, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is wonderfully singular. The short film is part of a collection of four other adaptations of Roald Dahl stories, and these films are bound together with a distinct style, one that is separate and unique from every other filmmaker, let alone Anderson’s previous work.

This collection uses a fascinating staging technique created by merging film and stage tropes with text taken directly from Dahl’s stories, creating something truly magical and immersive. Some films have astonishingly intricate staging that looks like theatre sets, while others use humans to represent abstract concepts and act as animals. The films look almost like plays, except they wouldn’t have been possible to make if they hadn’t been films.

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The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar Is Unlike Anything Wes Anderson (Or Anyone Else) Has Ever Made

There are echoes of The French Dispatch and The Grand Budapest Hotel, but Anderson's new short is a truly unique work.

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I was particularly taken with The Rat Catcher, a disturbing adaptation of Dahl’s ‘The Ratcatcher’ starring Ralph Fiennes, Rupert Friend, and Richard Ayoade. I’ve been reading Roald Dahl’s stories since I was a child, and first got my hands on a second-hand collection of his short stories for adults when I was about ten. My brain chemistry has never recovered from the things he described. I remember one story, The Visitor, very vividly – it was because of that tale that I learned what leprosy was. Dahl is very adept at writing the disturbing, the horrifying and the downright scary, which is a huge contributor to why Anderson’s The Rat Catcher was so bone-chilling. The source material is freaky, and so is the adaptation.

It’s more than that, though – Anderson is known for his focus on craft and the small details, and those details are used perfectly in The Rat Catcher. Ralph Fiennes is excellent as the rat catcher, a man who himself is extremely ratty and disconcerting. The ratman, as they call him, thrives on spectacle, loves being the most experienced person in the room, and is happy to use outlandishly horrific methods to get the attention of his audience.

There is a scene (spoilers!) where the ratman says he can kill the rat without using his hands, and asks his companions to wager against him. He then eats the rat. This is horrifying in itself, but the way it is shot made me shudder. Rupert Friend temporarily becomes the rat, putting in a fake pair of teeth and taking the pose of a terrified animal. The lights illuminating the set disappear, replaced by pointedly directed spotlights illuminating the actors’ faces from beneath.

This short film doesn’t follow any typical horror tropes, but it does its job of being extremely disconcerting and tense. After Wes Anderson’s play on form and stagecraft with the film, taking pains to make the viewer extremely aware that they are watching a constructed story, I can’t help but wonder how Anderson would interpret a horror film. He usually dabbles in comedic dramas, focusing on themes of grief and dysfunctional families, so a horror film would be a diversion from his usual style, but I need it anyway. His interpretations of Dahl’s dark, sometimes creepy work hit the nail on the head. I can’t help but want to see what he would do with a feature-length attempt.

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