Following his western sci-fi feature Asteroid City, we’re getting a whole lot more Wes Anderson this year, specifically later this month on Netflix. His latest Roald Dahl adaptation is a collection of four shorts that bring together Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes, Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley, Rupert Friend, and Richard Ayoade, kicking off with The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar on Sept. 27, The Swan on Sept. 28, The Ratcatcher on Sept. 29, and Poison on Sept. 30. Ahead of the releases, the trailer for the first 39-minute short, which premiered at Venice Film Festival, has now arrived. Netflix has also confirmed the subsequent three shorts are all 17 minutes each.
Leonardo Goi said in his review, “Following 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, the director adapts another Roald Dahl text, a 1977 short story of the same name. It’s rare to see two artists exist in such perfect symbiosis. Dahl was both a fabulist and conjurer, eager to conspire with children against the civilizing process of adulthood and concoct fables where the comic and sinister could meet and mingle. Watching Henry Sugar, it’s as if the director’s imagination served as an extension of the writer’s. Clocking in at 37 minutes, the featurette, as is so often the case with Anderson, is designed as a nesting doll of overlapping tales and narrators. We begin with Dahl himself (Ralph Fiennes), introducing what’s to follow (much like Bryan Cranston did in Asteroid City) and then bolt across time and space to meet the titular Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch), a writer-cum-playboy who one day happens upon a report penned by an Indian doctor (Dev Patel) about a most curious patient (Ben Kingsley): a man who had trained himself to see without his eyes.”
See the trailer below and learn more here.
