The Rat Catcher (2023)
The Rat Catcher Review
The Rat Catcher is a 2023 short film directed by Wes Anderson and starring Ralph Fiennes. It’s a solid flick.
A rat eradicator, who looks like a big rat, comes up with a cunning plan: gain the rats’ trust to better exterminate the rodents. This is one of the weaker of the four Wes Anderson shorts that he made for Netflix in 2023. My issue with it is the fact that only the Fiennes character is memorable. Richard Ayoade is a pretty good narrator, but he’s not Dev Patel. Rupert Friend is the most forgettable of the three. Both actors simply did not get enough to do here.
The story is also very simple and it’s about a rat catcher becoming similar to a rat in order to catch them easier. I personally found another message here, one that most missed and that is potentially much more interesting to discuss. As he talks about the rat blood used in food products, we can draw a line with our own hypocrisies as we would never personally kill a pig for instance, but would gladly eat pork in any meal.
Besides that theme, the plot is rather slight. It gets saved by the fantastic Ralph Fiennes performance as he is incredibly grotesque and fun here. He was perfectly cast. The production design is once again mesmerizing with a superb use of coulisses and a stagelike quality to the production that made it quite charming, though the rats being imaginary at first was a bit too silly.
