The Swan (2023)

The Swan Review

The Swan is a 2023 short film directed by Wes Anderson and starring Rupert Friend. It’s a moving flick.

Two large, ignorant bullies ruthlessly pursue a small, brilliant boy in this Roald Dahl adaptation from Wes Anderson’s collection of four short films released on Netflix in 2023. This is the strangest of the four stories, one that doesn’t fully work in its uneasy mixture of charming approach to storytelling and an inherently dark narrative core, but it was nonetheless a worthy effort that culminated with a particularly heartbreaking final image.

The narration from Rupert Friend is quite good and the choice to give him the role of a narrator instead of the boy beside him was a great choice as it fitted the theme of trauma from past bullying. You never get past these incidents from childhood, which the movie truthfully posits. The production design is once again wonderfully stagelike and endearing, though at times entirely refusing to depict what happened in the story was a bit frustrating.

The Swan is a flawed, but interesting experiment that mostly worked. The sets are gorgeous, the narration is thematically unique and the movie’s mixture of dark and light tones was inspired.

My Rating – 4.1