The Rat Catcher

A reporter and a mechanic in an English village meet a ratcatcher who lays out his ingenious method for getting the better of his quarry. Played by Ralph Fiennes, the man is a strange and unsettling figure, and his enthusiasm for the destruction he plans sits uncomfortably with the two men who have come to hear him out. The short film adapts a lesser-known story by Roald Dahl, with Fiennes also appearing as the author.

Wes Anderson directed and wrote the screenplay, working from the Dahl tale. It is the sixteenth of twenty-six films he has directed in chronological order, arriving after The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar in 2023 and followed by Poison the same year. Richard Ayoade appears as an editor and Rupert Friend as Claud Cubbage, alongside Eliel Ford, Benoît Herlin and Till Sennhenn as stagehands. The production was handled by Indian Paintbrush and American Empirical Pictures, with Anderson producing alongside Jeremy Dawson and Steven M. Rales.

Running seventeen minutes, the film was released on September 28, 2023. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.5 from more than twenty-five thousand votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.6 from a much smaller pool of several hundred.