Binge-worthy: Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl short film collection on Netflix is wicked good

The Rat Catcher, Poison and The Swan

Netflix

4 out of 5

English cruelty: Let’s talk about it. American film-maker Wes Anderson would like to kick off the discussion.

The director who makes each frame glow with the colours of an open box of macarons has tackled four short stories by British author Roald Dahl, which are all available on Netflix.

The first short film, The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar, is a mini-movie at 39 minutes long and has been getting the lion’s share of the spotlight.

But the rest of the collection, which clock in at a brief 17 minutes each, have their shining moments too.

Tonally, Henry Sugar is the odd one out because it is uplifting, or as uplifting as a Roald Dahl story can be.

Dahl’s writing comes to life when it is at its most sinister. It is the vein of horror that runs through his most famous children’s novels – The Witches (1983) and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory (1964) – that sets him apart.

Of the four stories in the collection, two are about horrible people who are horrible in peculiarly English ways.

The Swan and Poison are, in fact, included in a Dahl short-story collection titled Cruelty. The Rat Catcher seems to be a description of an eccentric before it also takes a macabre turn.

The Straits Times ranks the trio in descending order of quality.

1. The Rat Catcher (PG)

“The word ‘rats’ came out of his mouth with a rich, fruity sound, as if he were gargling with melted butter,” says the Editor (Richard Ayoade), who narrates the story.

This is a film that tries to take Dahl’s textures – the juicy sound of his sentences, the deliciously disgusting portrait of the rodent-like man come to rid a hayrick of pests – and puts them on the screen.

Ralph Fiennes plays the quasi-demonic pest controller of the title and Rupert Friend is garage owner Claud, looking on and judging smugly.

Anderson plays with contrasts with precision. The warm yellow-brown tint of the frame, Ayoade’s poker-faced narration and Claud’s sense of shock undercut the creepiness with just the right amount of humour.

2. Poison (PG)

In its presentation, this short film resembles the others.

One character looks into the camera, voicing Dahl’s text. Stagehands walk into frame to adjust props. Exterior walls fly apart to reveal interiors. The storytelling takes on the flavour of an old-time radio play performed live on stage.

It is minimalist, but never feels empty.

This story, set in colonial-era Bengal, is a beautiful tension-builder.

Woods (Dev Patel, who also voices Dahl’s words) comes home to find his roommate Harry (Benedict Cumberbatch) in bed, frozen in fear. A local physician, Dr Ganderbai (Ben Kingsley), is summoned.

What follows is a tragi-comic tale about toxins – the kind that flows in the fangs of reptiles and the other in the minds of British colonial officers, who hide their racism behind a veneer of civility.

One kind of bite can be fixed with modern medicine. The other cannot, and leaves a lasting, invisible wound on victims.

3. The Swan (PG13)

Several years ago, a YouTube video went viral because it intercut bits from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic The Shining with Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).

The parodic mash-up, titled Wes Anderson’s The Shining, is still available online. It is the closest thing Anderson fans can get to a horror movie.

Until now. The Swan’s story is a record of a bullying session; the horror is omnipresent.

Two rural boys meet a classmate, Peter (Asa Jennings), and decide to torture him.

In the original story, Dahl intended this piece of fiction to be a depiction of English working-class brutishness, a trait he describes as primarily expressed in football hooliganism, binge drinking, vandalism, violence inside the home and outside, and violence inflicted on others.

The original story would make for a bleak, all-too-real expose of rural sadism but for two factors: Anderson amends the text to provide a sense of hope, and also, of the three short films, this is the most visually abstract.

Only the victim, Peter, is shown. His tormentors are outside the frame.

Anderson chose this short story because of its poetic depiction of suffering, but blunts the message by over-aestheticising Peter’s plight.

Some things might be hard to watch, but that does not mean one should not show them.