The film was released on March 15, 2024, as an anthology compilation of Anderson's short films released in 2023; The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher and Poison. The anthology’s title references the short story collection from which the titular story derives, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar & Six More.
Plot
The anthology consists of four short film vignettes, each one based on the corresponding short story by Dahl.
The penultimate short film is based on the story The Ratcatcher from the 1953 collection.
A rat-catcher (Ralph Fiennes) comes to a petrol station to combat a rat infestation there. Station attendant Claud (Rupert Friend) and reporter (Richard Ayoade) take him to a hayrick across the road and the ratter scatters some oats around the hayrick. He repeats that for 2 more days and on the fourth day he places poisoned oats in little piles at every corner of the hayrick.
Arriving the next day and demanding a sack to collect the expected large number of dead rats, he is peeved to find not a single one. To regain the waning respect of Claud and the reporter, the rat-catcher performs a demonstration: he takes a live rat out of one of his pockets and a ferret out of another pocket, puts both animals down his shirt and then has the ferret kill the rat on his body. The catcher then performs the second demonstration as a bet how he can kill a rat without using his hands: he takes another live rat out of his knapsack, ties it to a petrol pump and kills it with his teeth. Having spat the dead animal's blood out and retrieved the won money, he states that confectionery factories and chocolate-makers use rat blood to make liquorice and then leaves. Thoroughly disgusted, Claud and the reporter are relieved to see him go.
A short film adaptation of the story published in 1950, about a man who claims a poisonous snake is upon his chest.
Credit: Rules For Being a Fictional Writer
Over the closing titles, Jarvis Cocker played the spoken-word song "Rules For Being a Fictional Writer", based on the 7 tips Dahl listed out for writing fiction in the chapter "Lucky Break".[2]
Roger Moore in his Movie Nation blog gave the film a rating of 3.5/4, concluding with:[9]
The way Anderson uses the actors, deadpan performances (mostly), narrating in a stacatto style, parked in front of clever settings in varying degrees of surreal “realism,” is almost animation... His style can be grating, especially that self-aware mugging-to-the-camera that he insists on. But here we see its greatest application, deadpan turns played underneath screwball-comedy-speed dialogue... The real Dahl was a real piece of work. But the work is timeless, and Anderson has rendered it in its most entertaining cinematic form with this short story collection feature film.
