Running a lean seventeen minutes, Poison packs a full arc of loyalty and betrayal between two close friends into a single tight sitting.
What is Poison about?
The short drops viewers straight into a street-level world where friendship is tested by the oldest pressures around: money, power, and the temptation to look out for yourself first. Two friends whose bond has carried them through hard times find that bond strained as greed creeps into the picture, and the film moves briskly toward the moment where loyalty either holds or breaks. With its short runtime, the piece has no room for padding; every scene is doing work to build toward that reckoning, and the result plays more like a compressed short story than a conventional comedy setup, even as flashes of dark humor run through it.
About the cast
The cast lines up an unusually heavyweight group for a short film, with Dev Patel, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ben Kingsley, and Ralph Fiennes all appearing, giving the piece a theatrical, ensemble feel despite its brief length.
Context & significance
Poison arrives from director Wes Anderson, whose 2023 run of short films built a reputation for pairing a recognizable directorial hand with dense, dialogue-forward storytelling squeezed into a fraction of a feature's runtime. Watched as part of that broader run, the short rewards viewers who enjoy precise, stage-like framing and a cast working in close quarters. Short-form work like this asks the actors to establish a relationship and its stakes almost instantly, and the film leans into that constraint rather than fighting it, treating the runtime as a rule of the game instead of a limitation.
Watching Poison on Ktime
Poison is available on K-Time with a Farsi dub and Persian subtitles, making the short easy to watch for Persian-speaking audiences. A free K-Time account login is required to press play; the page itself is open to browse without one.