Wes Anderson’s eleventh film is the most Wes Anderson film Wes Anderson has ever made. If, over the last three decades, you have fallen in love with the auteur’s unique sense of twee, pastel visuals, combined with inscrutable, deadpan dialogue, then you will love Asteroid City. By the time the cast start repetitively chanting, “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep!”, you are either invested in the writer, director, and producer’s reflections about his own creative process, or you’ll be left cold and confused.

Filmed mostly in super-wide, anamorphic format (2.39:1), with eye-popping colour saturation, the film recalls the bygone days of CinemaScope and the great American West. The film is only having a limited theatrical release, but it is worth seeking out the biggest screen you can find and enjoying the visuals in all their manically-precise, dead-centred glory.

But funnily enough, this CinemaScope throwback is not supposed to be a film, but a stage play. Like Rod Serling in a black and white, box-ratio episode of the Twilight Zone, narrator Bryan Cranston tells the viewers this directly. We see all the actors backstage, preparing for the CinemaScope play, struggling to make sense of their lines. The whole film is framed by the New York, east-coast, Broadway interpretation versus the California desert, west-coast interpretation. They’re both as confused and incomplete as each other.

As usual for Wes Anderson, the star-studded ensemble cast makes everyone a sort-of main character. But it’s when the ridiculously lo-fi, stop-motion alien turns up that the film reaches its mad climax.

Playing at select theatres from 16 June 2023.