‘Henry Sugar’ and Wes Anderson’s delightful Roald Dahl short films

With past works like “Rushmore,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel” on his resume, Wes Anderson would be forgiven for coasting on goodwill for the rest of his filmmaking career. Instead, in 2023, Anderson may be working at the peak of his creative powers.

In his feature this year, “Asteroid City,” Anderson fine tunes his recent fascination with nesting doll-like storytelling, delivering one of his most emotionally resonant efforts. Unravel the story-within-a-story-within-a story mechanics of the movie and you’ll discover Anderson exploring death and grief in ways both whimsical and unsparing.

For his follow-up effort this fall, Anderson turned to Netflix to create four live-action short films based on stories by author Roald Dahl (“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Matilda”), anchored by the 38-minute, Benedict Cumberbatch-starring, “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.” In honoring the idiosyncratic words of Dahl, Anderson has crafted a series of films unrivaled in style and execution.

Continuing his interest in visualizing the structural elements of storytelling, Anderson confines each of the films with intentional boundaries, most notably in its live theater style transitions and transforming backdrops. The actors in the stories sometimes use props or mime actions in place of objects and moments not feasible if depicted as a stage show.

Dahl’s words remain front and center as well. In every scene, one actor will recite the narration of the story in addition to their own dialogue — for example — looking at the camera and adding, “he said” after the spoken words of their character. Occasionally, Dahl himself appears (as played by Ralph Fiennes) reciting the story directly to the audience.

Only five actors appear across the four stories, all playing multiple roles. Cumberbatch plays the titular Henry Sugar, though that film has its own nesting doll approach with multiple narrators. The cast also includes Fiennes, Ben Kingsley, Dev Patel, Rupert Friend and Richard Ayoade.

“Henry Sugar,” is the meatiest of the stories at just under 40 minutes, while the other three films, “The Swan,” “The Rat Catcher” and “Poison” all run around 15 minutes. About half of “Henry Sugar” plays out before Cumberbatch takes center stage, but even in limited screen time, the newest star of the expansive troupe of Anderson performers fits comfortably into the tricky cadence of an Anderson-infused world of Roald Dahl.

“Henry Sugar” is also the warmest of the shorts. Cumberbatch plays a gambler who discovers an almost-supernatural method to cheating at cards, though the power has surprising effect on him.

The strangest film, “The Rat Catcher,” deploys a creepy Fiennes as an exterminator who must act like a rat in order to catch one.

“Poison,” about a petrified man (Cumberbatch) who begs a friend (Patel) and a doctor (Kingsley) to rescue him from a venomous snake hiding under his bed covers, is an efficient exercise in tension-building before the movie takes an unexpected turn into social commentary. “Poison” had been previously adapted by Alfred Hitchcock for television back in 1958, but Anderson’s version tackles the story’s racist elements with a thoughtful and impactful climactic punch.

The best of the bunch (though all four are wonderful) is “The Swan,” which features Rupert Friend both narrating the story and portraying the young boy who is terrorized by two bullies (also voiced by Friend) near a set of train tracks. Friend’s kinetic one-man show, combined with some surprising visual flourishes by Anderson to execute the story’s action elements, make “The Swan” a unique and instantly rewatchable experience.

Taken together, these Anderson shorts look and sound like nothing else, including the well-known Dahl cinematic interpretations, like Anderson’s own “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” The shorts are sort of like visual adaptations of an audio book told by a theater troupe of enthusiastic actors and stagehand engineers. One can only hope Anderson makes more, and that one of them, any of them, finally lands him an overdue Academy Award (albeit in the less “glitzy” Oscar category of live action short.

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Tyler Wilson can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.