Asteroid City Review: Wes Anderson at His Strangest – and Best

Asteroid City opens with a black-and-white TV presenter introducing a play called Asteroid City — a play we are about to watch being made, inside the film we are watching, presented as a television programme. If that sentence needed a second read, you are already deep inside what makes this film both infuriating and extraordinary. Wes Anderson’s 2023 feature is not so much a movie as a philosophical diorama: a meditation on grief, creative paralysis, and the inexplicability of certain human experiences, wrapped in the most jaw-dropping ensemble cast assembled in recent memory.

The first 30 minutes are a test. They are designed to be. Anderson punishes impatience here more than anywhere else in his filmography. But if you can sit with the confusion — if you can let the nested structure settle rather than fight it — what emerges by the final act is something genuinely moving. An 8/10 that earned every point the hard way.

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Asteroid City (Blu-ray + DVD + Digital) (opens in a new tab)

The format for rewatches — and you will rewatch this. The commentary track is essential for unpacking the nested structure and Anderson's visual grammar.

The film arrives with credentials that stop you cold: a cast list that reads like a producer’s fever dream, cinematography by Robert D. Yeoman that makes the Arizona desert look like a pastel planet, and a score by Alexandre Desplat that is all jangling guitar and woozy melancholy. Anderson shot this back-to-back with The French Dispatch, and it shows — both films push his formal ambitions to their limits. But where The French Dispatch was a gleeful anthology sprint, Asteroid City is a slow, deliberate excavation.

For the Dadnology community, this is a film that asks something unusual: not just your attention, but your patience. Reward that patience, and you get one of the decade’s most original explorations of grief, fatherhood, and why we make art in the first place.

The Structure: A Film Inside a Film Inside a Film

The nested architecture is the first thing every reviewer mentions about Asteroid City, usually with a hint of exasperation. Here it is, as clearly as possible.

A black-and-white 1950s television programme is presenting a documentary about a new play called Asteroid City, written by a fictional playwright named Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). The play is set in a tiny desert town called Asteroid City, where a group of families have gathered for a junior stargazer competition. During the competition, an alien appears, steals the titular meteor, and disappears — prompting a government-enforced quarantine. The families cannot leave.

At the centre of those families: Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a widowed war photographer on a road trip with his four children, who has just learned — in the film’s opening minutes — that his wife died five weeks earlier. He hasn’t told his children yet.

The play-within-a-broadcast conceit is not Anderson being difficult for its own sake. It is doing three things simultaneously. First, it creates an emotional distance from the grief at the film’s centre — a distance that feels, paradoxically, truer to how grief actually works than direct-address could manage. Second, it lets Anderson interrogate the creative process itself: we see actors struggling with scenes, directors losing their grip on the material, writers unable to explain what their own work means. Third, it creates a space where the inexplicable — an alien, a sudden death — can exist without requiring resolution.

The film’s thesis is right there in its most quoted line: “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.” A character asks why they cannot leave the quarantined town. That is the answer they are given. Anderson seems to be saying: there are experiences — grief, creative blocks, incomprehensible encounters — that cannot be shortcut or explained away. They must be lived through. The confusion you feel watching the film is the film’s subject.

Visual Grammar: Symmetry as Emotional Armour

If you have seen five minutes of a Wes Anderson film, you know the visual signature: bilateral symmetry, every frame composed like an illustration, actors who move in deliberate and stylised paths, colour palettes chosen with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker.

In Asteroid City, the technique acquires a specific purpose. The desert sequences are shot in a warm muted palette — sand, ochre, terracotta — punctuated by pops of turquoise and the neon orange of government vehicles. Every shot is a painting. But where some critics read the style as distancing — a barrier between viewer and emotion — Anderson is doing something more precise here: he is using the symmetry as his character Augie would use a camera viewfinder.

Augie is a war photographer. He has built his entire professional and emotional life around framing — around finding meaning in catastrophe through the act of composition. When his wife dies, he cannot stop composing. The film’s immaculate framing is Augie’s grief: the compulsive ordering of chaos into manageable rectangles. The more devastating the subject, the more perfect the frame.

Anderson’s use of the 4:3 black-and-white ratio for the TV documentary sections is equally deliberate. Those sequences feel archival, historical — as if the creative process being documented is already a relic before it is finished. When the film cuts back to the colour desert, there is a jolt: this story is happening now, in the messy present. The formal contrast is the film’s emotional engine.

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The Grand Budapest Hotel (Blu-ray) (opens in a new tab)

If Asteroid City is your entry point to Anderson, this is where to go next — the perfect gateway to his visual language, deadpan wit, and hotel-lobby ensemble energy.

The desert location itself — shot partly in Chinchón, Spain, doubling for the American Southwest — is both alien and archaic. Against this backdrop, the characters’ precise, slightly theatrical movement looks exactly right. They are staging their grief the way the film stages its nested stories. Everyone here is performing. Everyone is trying to find the frame that makes sense of something that does not.

The Ensemble: How Does He Keep Getting Them?

Cast lists in Wes Anderson films have stopped being impressive and started being surreal. Asteroid City features Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Margot Robbie, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Steve Carell, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Maya Hawke, and Rupert Friend, among others. In any other context, four of those names together would make headlines. Here, they are all supporting cast in a 105-minute film.

How? Two reasons, and they are connected.

First, Anderson has spent 30 years building a genuine creative community. Bill Murray has been in nearly every film since Rushmore. Jason Schwartzman was a teenager when he starred in Rushmore and has never really left. Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Edward Norton — they return again and again not because they are contractually obligated, but because Anderson’s sets are known for being uniquely stimulating environments. He arrives with storyboards that are essentially the finished film, shot-for-shot, and the production becomes a collective act of precise execution. For actors accustomed to sprawling, improvised blockbuster shoots, the precision is — oddly — liberating. You know exactly what the job is. You do it. You feel like part of something specific.

Second, the roles themselves are almost always interesting, even when small. Jeffrey Wright gets three scenes in Asteroid City and manages to convey a complex moral universe in each. Tom Hanks has perhaps six minutes of screen time as Augie’s estranged father-in-law and makes every second count. Actors understand that a small Wes Anderson role is a character, not a cameo.

The result is ensemble work where the margins are as rich as the centre — and the centre, in Schwartzman and Johansson, is genuinely excellent. Their tentative, grief-adjacent chemistry is one of the film’s most understated pleasures: two people who recognise something broken in each other and don’t quite know what to do with the recognition.

What Asteroid City Is Actually About (For Dads)

Strip away the nested structure, the alien, the symmetry, and you are left with a film about a father who does not know how to tell his children their mother is dead.

Augie Steenbeck has the information. He has been carrying it since the film’s opening minutes. He calls his father-in-law, who tells him he has to tell the kids. He calls his own father, who does not know what to say. He stands in the desert, surrounded by his four children who are alive and present and asking for things, and he cannot find the words.

That specific paralysis — the way grief can make you simultaneously functional and inert — is what Asteroid City is really about. Anderson found a genuinely audacious way to embody it: he built a film that is itself unable to complete itself, unable to explain itself, unable to give its audience the resolution they expect. The play-within-a-documentary structure is not pretension. It is the feeling of being a dad who knows something terrible and cannot yet say it.

The alien encounter is the tipping point: after something genuinely inexplicable happens, the expectation that ordinary explanations will suffice collapses completely. The government quarantine — absurd, bureaucratic, circular — mirrors exactly how grief operates. You cannot leave until you have processed it. You cannot process it until you stop trying to leave.

For dads who have ever stood between their children and a reality they did not know how to frame, this film is — eventually, quietly — devastating.

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The Wes Anderson Collection: Asteroid City (opens in a new tab)

The official companion book packed with concept art, storyboards, and Anderson's notes on the film. Essential for anyone who wants to understand what the film is actually doing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Asteroid City about?

On the surface, it is about a group of families stranded in a tiny desert town after an alien steals a meteor at a junior stargazer competition. Beneath that, it is about grief, the compulsion to make art, and why certain experiences resist explanation — and why that is okay.

Is Asteroid City confusing?

Yes, deliberately so — and that is the point. The film has a nested structure: a TV documentary about the making of a play called Asteroid City. The opening half requires patience. By the end, the confusion itself becomes the subject. Watch it twice.

Is Asteroid City worth watching?

If you can let go of conventional narrative expectations: absolutely. It baffles before it illuminates, and the illumination is worth the wait. 8 out of 10.

What does the line you cannot wake up if you do not fall asleep mean in Asteroid City?

It is the film’s central riddle. A character asks why they cannot leave the quarantined town and is told: you cannot wake up if you do not fall asleep. Anderson seems to be saying that certain experiences — grief, creative blocks, incomprehensible events — cannot be resolved or shortcut. They must be lived through completely.

How does Wes Anderson get such incredible casts?

Two reasons: he has built a loyal creative family over 30 years — actors like Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, and Tilda Swinton return across multiple films. And his sets are notoriously precise but creatively stimulating — actors describe them as closer to performance art than conventional shoots. The creative experience is the draw, not the paycheck.

When was Asteroid City released?

Asteroid City premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2023 and received a wide release in June 2023. It is available on Blu-ray and streaming platforms.