English cruelty: Let’s talk about it. American film-maker Wes Anderson would like to kick off the discussion.
But the rest of the collection, which clock in at a brief 17 minutes each, have their shining moments too. Of the four stories in the collection, two are about horrible people who are horrible in peculiarly English ways. This is a film that tries to take Dahl’s textures – the juicy sound of his sentences, the deliciously disgusting portrait of the rodent-like man come to rid a hayrick of pests – and puts them on the screen.
Woods comes home to find his roommate Harry in bed, frozen in fear. A local physician, Dr Ganderbai , is summoned. Several years ago, a YouTube video went viral because it intercut bits from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic The Shining with Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel .