The man who claims he can see with his eyes closed. A man who asserted he could fly like a swan in his youth. The man who claimed he could kill a mouse without touching it. The man who said a poisonous snake lay sleeping in his gut. This curious troupe first appeared in Roald Dahl’s literary world and now steps onto Wes Anderson’s cinema, returning to screens once again. It is a reminder of how summer plans and a strong film catalog can linger in memory from 2023.
“The Wonderful Story of Sugar Henry” stops being a standalone feature and becomes the first of four short films drawn from Dahl’s realms: it and “The Swan” come from a collection of the same name, with two others—”Someone Like You” from the volume “The Village of Hamelin” Piper and “Poison”—also included. The initial three pieces had not previously appeared on big or small screens, while the fourth marks Anderson’s entry after a challenging warm-up act—Alfred Hitchcock himself directed the premiere episode of the second season of the anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and the author Dahl contributed the narration for the fifth episode of the second season of the anthology True Stories. The anticipation is tempered by the knowledge that the director keeps his nerves. The performance succeeds in that respect.
Nowadays it seems unnecessary to praise Anderson to a broad audience: fans have likely seen everything he has done, while those tired of the local candy-colored puppetry that nudges the nerves in neurodivergent viewers might not want to be invited back. After The Grand Budapest Hotel, the director appears to have shed some of the desire to deceive his audience or create films solely for personal pleasure.
Still, there is a surprising amount of vitality in this project for those who care to engage. The collection of short films, which lacks a single umbrella title, marks a fresh direction in the director’s body of work. In earlier works, Anderson, who is revisiting Dahl after previously adapting The Fantastic Mr. Fox, crafted candy-colored realities from fragments of our own world. These realms felt almost deliberately conditional, yet their inhabitants lived within their rules with a certain charm. The new set shifts away from that familiar stylistic endurance toward a distinct environment with its own logic.
In a sense, Anderson steps beyond his established style in Henry Sugar and builds a self-contained world with its own rules and rhythms.
He speaks with confidence about his signature sensibility. The prevailing view is that cinema, as an audiovisual craft, should show rather than tell. In these pieces, dialogue carries weight, and the visuals resemble an audiobook brought to life rather than a faithful literature-to-film adaptation. At the end of each short, a succinct note explains the circumstances of the adaptation. The characters are present through speech rather than action, and the actors—Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes, Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley, Richard Ayoade, and Rupert Friend—exhibit a restrained presence that relies on spoken resonance rather than overt physicality.
The work sits at the convergence of theater and cinema. The entire project was produced on a studio stage, and the collaboration between the cinematographer and production designer, including stage movements, becomes as intriguing as the narrative itself. The absence of a fourth wall is felt, with the stories addressing the audience directly, and moments where the stage apparatus intrudes into the frame functioning as part of the narrative texture. The handling earns a playful nod to film history while keeping a modern cadence that suits the material.
What stands out is a persistent humanity beneath the formal play of structure. The forty minutes devoted to The Miraculous Case of Henry Sugar sit alongside the preceding hour and a half of Asteroid City, which centers on the making of a fictitious play embedded within a film about the play. It is a nested storytelling architecture where reality folds into fiction and back again. Yet the collection also reveals tenderness in The Wonderful Story, a stark solemnity in The Swan, and a dark irony in The Pied Piper and Poison. This balance—humane warmth amid striking formal choices—appeals to those looking for more than flashy surface tricks.