Director: Wes Anderson
Wes Anderson turns Roald Dahl's short fiction inward with Poison, a 2024 anthology film weaving three tales of outsiders, temptation, and cruelty into a single restless portrait of human nature.
What is Poison about?
The film moves between three loosely linked vignettes rather than following one throughline. A boy's desperate act at age seven sends him fleeing into a life shaped by guilt and reinvention. Elsewhere, a scientist's obsession with an extracted human essence spirals into something darker than curiosity. A third strand follows a man enduring the casual brutality of confinement, his dignity worn down by those meant to guard him. Anderson's trademark symmetry and deadpan narration sit uneasily against material this bleak, and that friction is the point: tidy frames can't contain the ugliness underneath. Dev Patel, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ben Kingsley, and Ralph Fiennes trade off narrating and inhabiting these stories, giving each segment its own register of dread.
Cast & crew
Cumberbatch and Fiennes anchor the film's coldest passages with clipped, theatrical delivery, while Patel and Kingsley bring a rougher, more physical presence to the segments closest to violence. The ensemble reads more like a repertory troupe passing a script between them than a conventional cast, which suits the anthology's shifting tone.
Context & significance
Poison arrives as Anderson's most overtly unsettling work, adapting source material far removed from the whimsical family dynamics of his earlier films. Shot with the same meticulous production design fans expect, it uses that polish to unsettle rather than comfort, letting each of its three chapters build toward a different kind of unease. Running a lean 85 minutes, the anthology format keeps each story compact, closer to a folk tale than a fully developed feature plot, which gives the film an unusual, clipped rhythm from one segment to the next.
Where & how to watch
Poison is available to watch on K-Time with a free account login. The film includes a Persian dub track, and the site's Farsi-first interface makes browsing and queuing titles like this one straightforward for Persian-speaking viewers.