Another gem from Anderson in which, deftly, the dramatic genre is carried with a metanarrative dental floss to the paroxysm of another very common genre in it, the farce. True, with the director's style the literary naturalness of Dahl is lost, but those of us who love theater win, even if it is overacted! Woods, the officer who narrates - not at all omniscient - seems immersed in a chronicle of the event that he is unaware of - the super poisonous Bungarus snake - since his arrival in the jeep but, simultaneously, what his speech recounts in "object language", or That is, which refers to the hardships and feverish calamity of Harry Pope feeling the snake sleeping in him, intelligently passes to the "metalanguage" with the presence of Dr. Ganderbai who, in situ, in the midst of a crisis of snake and danger, awaits the metadiscourse of Woods as if Ben Kingsley himself, carrying and showing his hypodermic syringe, were like an airplane stewardess showing the masks and emergency exits of the aircraft, waiting for Woods to continue with the script, which, by the way, is not the script but internal, because the commentary or epilogue by Ralph Fiennes, a transcript of Roald Dahl, is missing. As if the lightness of the drama were not shaved by the delicacy of the black humor, Anderson streamlines the staging following his usual style, sometimes cutting into two frames (that of the neurotic Woods and that of Dr. Ganderbai exhibiting the utensils used in the inert and sweating Harry), in others with a panoramic cameo of rugged verticality, seen from the ceiling that adds drama attenuated to half laughter by the rueful face of Dev Patel's character. Dev Patel is majestic, top-notch.
Review of Poison
