The Rat Catcher

The Rat Catcher (2023) is Wes Anderson's short film from a Roald Dahl story, available to watch online on iFILM. Seventeen minutes, an English village, three men by a filling station and a deeply unpleasant visitor.

A ratcatcher is called in to deal with an infestation near the hayrick. A reporter (Richard Ayoade) and a mechanic (Rupert Friend) stand and listen as he lays out his clever scheme to outwit the vermin. Ralph Fiennes plays the man so that his face, his manner and his appetite mirror his prey unnervingly — and he clearly relishes every horror he's about to commit.

Anderson keeps Dahl's prose almost intact: the cast reads stage directions aloud, the sets are openly theatrical, the camera glides across flat painted flats. It belongs to his four-story Dahl anthology for Netflix, alongside The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. A small, strange, precisely tuned thing for admirers of either man. Stream The Rat Catcher (2023) online on iFILM.