The premise belongs to Roald Dahl, but the image is pure Anderson: a man frozen in bed, sheets drawn to his chin, while somewhere beneath the fabric a poisonous snake has settled onto his stomach. Stillness is the engine of Poison, one of four short films Anderson directed for Netflix in 2023, and it turns out to be simultaneously the film’s greatest resource and its primary liability.

Harry Pope (Benedict Cumberbatch) cannot move. His associate Supervisor Woods (Dev Patel) discovers him rigid with terror, whispering instructions not to shift a muscle, then goes at speed to fetch Dr. Ganderbai (Ben Kingsley). The drama from this point consists almost entirely of three men standing around a bed, attempting not to disturb whatever is — or may be — coiled beneath the sheets. No car chases. No swelling orchestra. No conventional release. Anderson commits absolutely to the constraint, and for most of the running time the discipline earns its keep. The claustrophobia is physical, the visual problem of how to make a motionless protagonist compelling turns out to have several interesting solutions, and the performances have genuine room to breathe within the stillness.

Anderson has always been a director for whom the frame is a container of precise social meaning: who stands where, who looks at whom, who is placed at the centre and who drifts to the margin. In Poison this vocabulary serves the material with unusual directness. The three-man arrangement around the bed is not merely a staging solution; it is a map of the power relations Anderson intends to examine. Woods stands slightly apart from both Ganderbai and Pope, visible to both, deferring to both on different grounds. Ganderbai stands at the technical centre — he has the relevant knowledge — but the blocking perpetually returns him to a position that is never quite central in any other sense. Pope, who cannot move, who has no agency at all, is nonetheless the figure around whom every decision in the room organises itself. That is the arrangement Anderson wants you to notice. The camera finds it without comment and lets it accumulate.

What the film does best is to render this dynamic as a social architecture rather than a plot mechanism. Ben Kingsley has almost nothing to do by conventional acting metrics — no confrontational moments, no high dramatic outburst to anchor his presence. His performance consists instead of minute adjustments: a slight drawing back of the shoulders when Pope speaks, the briefest compression of the lips before answering a question that does not deserve the patience it receives. Those adjustments accumulate into something quietly devastating over the film’s short running time. The history of the character — a career spent proving himself to people who had decided the verdict before he arrived — is entirely legible without a word being said about it. This is the kind of performance that disappears into ensemble films and lodges somewhere in the memory years later.

Cumberbatch’s Pope radiates querulous English entitlement. Too frightened to be polite and too entitled to be grateful: the performance keeps both registers alive in the same breath, the same muscle, without resolving them into a more comfortable single note. The desperation is genuine; the ugliness is equally genuine; and the skill is in maintaining the two simultaneously rather than alternating between them. Cumberbatch has a gift for men who are simultaneously more and less sympathetic than they believe themselves to be, and Pope is a precise fit for that gift. Dev Patel navigates Woods’s structural impossibility — bystander to a man unravelling, subordinate to a doctor he visibly respects far more than the patient he serves — with a physical delicacy the camera barely pauses to register. Anderson tends to shoot ensemble performances the way he shoots wallpaper: the detail is exact, the eye is drawn to the centre, the periphery rewards a second viewing. The stagehands, played by Eliel Ford and Benoît Herlin, appear at the visible edges of the action as reminders of the machinery — another layer of the meta-theatrical framing Anderson applies across all four shorts to keep the storytelling self-conscious without tipping into self-congratulation.

Ralph Fiennes appears as Roald Dahl himself, delivering the narration with the dry precision of someone reading meeting minutes for a meeting he considers several tiers below his attention. The effect places Poison firmly within the shared conceit of the series: we are watching a performance of a story, theatrical apparatus undisguised, stage lights at frame edges, the construction openly acknowledged. As a device this is exactly as clever as Anderson’s devices tend to be. It also maintains a consistent arm’s-length remove between the audience and the material. When the distancing is working, it gives the film a cool, almost anthropological quality — the sensation of watching human behaviour through glass, which suits a story about the inability to say what one means. When it is not, the glass is simply glass.

The four shorts place Anderson inside unusually tight formal constraints: each adapts a Dahl story, each uses a visible stage apparatus, each features Fiennes as Dahl narrating from outside the fiction. Within these shared parameters, Poison occupies a specific tonal register — more morally urgent, less whimsical than the others, closer to the anxious edge of Dahl’s originals than to the warm charm they are sometimes remembered for. Dahl wrote characters who behave badly and are not redeemed. Pope fits this lineage precisely. The question Anderson is really asking is not whether Pope will survive the night but what his survival will reveal about him. That is a Dahl question. Anderson makes it his own by staging the revelation as a formal procedure rather than an emotional eruption.

The film’s real subject — and it has one, pursued with a bluntness that appears entirely deliberate — is the other kind of poison in the room. The snake beneath the sheets is a snake; it is also the accumulated toxin of colonial contempt, the particular venom that runs through the deference and the courtesy and the carefully managed civility of empire. The word “poison” traces its etymology through Old French from the Latin potio — a drink, particularly a medicinal one, something consumed willingly and absorbed into the body, indistinguishable from ordinary sustenance until the symptoms present. Something that can be remedy and ruin simultaneously, its nature determined by dose and context. Anderson earns this analogy because he takes the literal situation seriously. The snake is a real snake. The terror is real terror. The film does not wink at the second meaning until it is ready to deliver it, and that restraint is its best formal quality.

The final scene arrives as confirmation rather than revelation. Pope’s reaction to the resolution of his crisis tells you, in a few seconds, more about the man and about the world that produced him than any expository scene could manage. It lands — cleanly, hard, without sentiment. The problem is that the film has spent its preceding minutes signalling this conclusion in overlapping circuits, returning to the same thematic territory without advancing the argument each time around. The critique of Anderson’s method — that stylistic precision can become a form of insulation, a way of keeping the material at a safe remove from genuine feeling — applies here more acutely than to most of his work. The style is not wrong for this material; it is right for it. The difficulty is that it is applied in repetition, so that by the time the ending arrives the viewer has assembled what is coming, and the revelation confirms what has already been concluded.

This circularity is unusual for Anderson. His features move with an almost aggressive efficiency that the short does not consistently match. The motionless premise seems to have carried over into the editing; scenes that could quicken do not, and returns to the bedside feel like returns rather than advances. The film’s pacing difficulty is not a slow-cinema problem — he is a capable practitioner of stillness — but a circular-argument problem: the case is made, then made again, then made once more in slightly different terms. When the film’s visual system and its thematic system are aligned, the stillness is active and purposeful, the charged silence before a verdict. When they drift apart, it is simply a brief film that does not move. The visual vocabulary remains exact and the colour register precisely calibrated throughout; the difficulty is not in the quality of the individual images but in what they are asked to do across time.

The critical reception has been appropriately mixed. Praise for the visual construction and for the performances, reservations about the narrative execution and the pacing, acknowledgment of the thematic ambition without full confidence that the delivery completes it — that is a fair account of what Poison offers and where it falls short. The comparison to The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, the most celebrated of the four Dahl shorts, recurs in critical discussion for good reason: both films feature Cumberbatch and Kingsley, and both deploy the same meta-theatrical apparatus toward material with genuine moral weight. Henry Sugar uses that vocabulary toward a structure that pays it off more completely. Poison earns its place in the series, but the company it keeps throws its limitations into sharper relief.

What the film achieves when it is working is precise and pointed. The final exchange between Kingsley and Cumberbatch is uncomfortable in exactly the ways it needs to be, and the discomfort has been earned rather than announced, because neither actor has spent the film signposting it. The metaphor of poison — in Dahl’s original spread across the moral landscape of British India — translates cleanly into Anderson’s register, which is cool intelligence applied to hot subject matter. The sting, when it comes, is quiet and small and does not go away quickly. Within Anderson’s filmography, Poison is a minor entry in good standing: cut close to its material by the constraints of the format, committed to the argument it came to make, and limited mainly by the gap between the precision of its formal execution and the somewhat circular path it takes to get there.