By John Corrado

★★★★ (out of 4)

Wes Anderson has developed one of the most unique styles of any modern American filmmaker across his rich body of work, and his 11th feature, Asteroid City, offers perhaps his most metatextual narrative yet. And it’s his best since The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Through Anderson’s playfully subversive storytelling choices, Asteroid City almost serves as a deconstruction of his work and aesthetic. Beneath the symmetrical framing and pastel colour palate, lies a poignant story about grief and the passage of time, and the artifices that we use to help make sense of these feelings.

Amidst Anderson’s characteristically quirky touches and moments of delightfully droll, bone-dry humour, the director also stages a collection of bittersweet moments that have a lingering impact, even if it isn’t instantly explainable as to why. Underpinning it all is that unique sense of melancholia that has defined all of his best works, and is a key component of Anderson’s films that his detractors and cheap social media imitators (including those garish AI copies) have utterly failed to capture.

The setting for Asteroid City is a Junior Stargazing Convention in the 1950s, being held in a sparsely populated desert town that is famous for the asteroid that fell there years earlier, where nerdy science kids are gathering with their parents to learn about space. The characters include Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwarzman), a recently widowed war photographer who is accompanying his son Woodrow (Eighth Grade scene-stealer Jake Ryan) to the convention, and movie star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), who is there with her daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards).

But the convention is disrupted by otherworldly events. Yes, this is Anderson dipping his feet into the sci-fi playground, and the results are as fantastical as that sounds. Anderson ingeniously tells the story through a number of Matryoshka-like framing devices, including shifting aspect ratios, and between colour and black-and-white. The film’s deeper all-the-world-is-a-stage metaphor is a fitting backdrop for Anderson’s imaginative production design (the film was shot in Spain) and immaculate centre framings, captured on gorgeous 35mm KODAK film by cinematographer Robert Yeoman.

No stranger to sprawling ensembles, Anderson also assembles one of his most star-studded casts. This includes previous collaborators such as Tilda Swinton, Adrian Brody and Jeffrey Wright, as well as new additions to the stock company like Tom Hanks (as Augie’s father-in-law) and Steve Carell (stepping in to replace Bill Murray, who reportedly dropped out due to having COVID). The cast is led by Bryan Cranston as a sort of narrator, while performers like Schwarzman and Johansson are able to deliver some lovely character moments.

Claims that this is one of Anderson’s airiest concoctions feel erroneous; it’s actually one of his richest and most existential works. Characters ponder the meaning of life and the existence of heaven, in that deadpan, matter-of-fact Anderson sort of way. It’s a work that doesn’t instantly reveal everything it is trying to say, but is moving in that wistful, almost unexplainable way that many of his films are, packed with details and layers of depth that I suspect will only grow stronger on subsequent viewings.

Asteroid City opens exclusively in theatres on June 23rd.