Poison (2023)

Wes Anderson returns to the Roald Dahl cupboard for a seventeen-minute exercise in sustained abdominal suspense. A venomous snake has settled onto the stomach of an Englishman in colonial India, and the man's associate and a doctor spend the runtime attempting to extract it without provoking a fatal bite. The camera holds still. The narration is flat. The tension is real, which is a strange thing to report about a film whose central image is a grown man lying rigid while a reptile enjoys his torso. It is a chamber piece in the most literal sense, and it ends exactly when it should.

The casting of Dev Patel and Ben Kingsley as Indian characters raises the ambient temperature of representation by a modest degree, though both are simply occupying roles the setting requires. The British Raj hovers at the edges as furniture, a fact of the room, never a thesis. There is no woman of consequence in the story. There is no economic argument, no ecological warning, no reclamation of history. The snake is not a symbol. The snake is a snake, and its ambitions extend no further than warmth.

Anderson's narration, delivered with his customary dryness, recounts rather than instructs. No lesson is offered, no viewer is scolded, no moral is tacked to the final frame. The film is adapted from a published short story, which is the only classification it earns with any confidence. What we have, then, is a small, tense, beautifully arranged anecdote about a man who cannot move. It asks nothing of us except attention. In the current climate, that restraint registers as almost radical, though it is not, strictly speaking, anything of the kind. It is simply a story told well, and left alone.