Two large, ignorant bullies hunt a small, brilliant boy, and they do not let up. That is the whole premise of The Swan, Wes Anderson‘s 2023 adaptation of a Roald Dahl story, and it is a bleak one for a director most people file under dollhouse comedy. The BBFC rates the film for violence, a bullying theme and dangerous behaviour. Fair enough.

The Swan runs about 17 minutes. It is one of four Dahl shorts Netflix released in September 2023, and it keeps the method Anderson used in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar: the characters tell the story to us, and the film is built on that telling rather than on conventional scenes. Rupert Friend plays both the narrator and the adult Peter Watson, so the man who came through it is the one describing what happened to the boy. Ralph Fiennes appears as Dahl himself. Asa Jennings plays the young Peter. Four stagehands, Eliel Ford, Truman Hanks, Benoît Herlin and Octavio Tapia, are also in the cast list, an odd and rather pleasing credit for a film about a chase.

The look is the first thing to talk about. Anderson’s flat, symmetrical, exactly composed frames could easily have turned a story about cruelty into a handsome object, and for a while you worry that they will. Then the tidiness starts to work against the material. The neater the picture, the colder the pursuit feels, because nothing in it looks messy or accidental. The bullies come across as people who know exactly what they are doing, and the style lends them that composure without ever pointing at it.

Friend carries much of the weight. He reads in a steady, faintly weary voice, the voice of someone who has told this before and still finds it hard. He supplies the adult vantage point and never stops to explain it. Fiennes has less to do, but his presence is a useful reminder that Dahl was never as cosy as his reputation. Jennings has the harder job. Peter has to be frightened and quick-minded at once, and the young actor manages both without pleading for our sympathy, which is exactly where a weaker performance would have gone wrong.

One write-up of the film names freedom, endurance and faith as the themes the story plays with. The short touches all three, but it is most interested in endurance: how much a small person can take, and how long a sharp mind keeps working while the body is under threat. That is a narrow focus. For a running time this short it is also the sensible one, since there is no space to explore much else and the film does not pretend otherwise.

The limits are real, though. In 17 minutes there is no room for the bullies to become anything other than a danger. The synopsis calls them ignorant, and that is how they are drawn: two big problems on legs. A longer film might have found something human in them, and would have been more disturbing for it. The same brevity means the emotional payoff arrives quickly and is gone just as fast. Viewers who do not know Dahl’s story may feel the ending land a beat before they are ready for it.

Anderson’s method also costs something for anyone who wants rawness. His films hold the audience at a careful distance, and this one is no exception. We see what Peter is going through, but as if through glass. Some will call that clinical. I found it controlled, and the control suits a story about a boy who survives by keeping his head.

The stylization does not drown the story. It does ask for patience, because the formal pleasures come first and the discomfort follows them. That order seems deliberate to me. You admire the arrangement of the frame, and only afterwards ask yourself what exactly is being arranged and why it has been made so calm.

Set beside Henry Sugar, The Swan is the darker and more compact piece. It lacks the playful structure of its predecessor and wisely does not try to copy it. What it offers instead is one chase, one narrator and a style disciplined enough to make the cruelty feel exact. It is not Anderson at his richest. But it is a shorter, harder thing than most of what he has made, and its unease lingers well after the 17 minutes are over.