Any Wes Anderson film appears to strike a balance between whimsy and pretence, and the level of one’s enjoyment will ultimately be predicated on how much each individual enjoys whimsy and tolerates pretension. In the case of 2023’s Asteroid City it seems the whimsical stylings are reasonably high, but either I have grown accustomed to Anderson’s seemingly self-satisfied and smug delivery or it is reasonably subdued this time around. I am not quite certain what the filmmaker-to-viewer equivalent is to the idea of “frenemy”, but I feel it reflects my relationship with Wes Anderson. I go hot and cold on his works, and I really enjoy some while bouncing hard off of others. I appreciated Asteroid City with warm sentiment, and an overall sense of amusement. It is, from my perspective, one of “the good ones”.

Photographer and grieving father Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) drives his four children to the isolated desert town of Asteroid City, so that his eldest can compete in a stargazing event come science fair. When the town’s namesake – a thousands-year-old crashed meteorite – is stolen in front of the entire fair by an alien visitor, it forces every witness to confront their uncertainty about the universe around them.

The above narrative hardly encapsulates the overall film, of course. It is framed by a stage production in which actor Jones Hall (also Schwartzman) plays Augie, with Edward Norton and Adrien Brody playing the writer and director respectively. Jones questions if he understands what the play is about, and fruitlessly interrogates his director for why character impulsively burns his hand during the third act. His director doesn’t have any answer. Nobody does. This is Asteroid City in a nutshell: nothing makes sense, and all you can do is learn to cope with that.

As with almost all of Anderson’s films, the story played out via a series of vignettes: these little scenes are impeccably designed and deliberately artificial, and stunt-cast with an array of acclaimed and award-winning talent. Schwartzman, an Anderson regular since the beginning, is particularly effective – as is Scarlett Johanssen as in-play movie star Midge Campbell. A big surprise is Tom Hanks, here playing Augie’s cantankerous father-in-law, who is an unexpected fit for this kind of abstracted fare. He is good, but also weirdly out of place given the sorts of films he usually headlines. Other cast members include Matt Dillon, Steve Carell, Jeffrey Wright, Willem Dafoe, Maya Hawke, Margo Robbie, and (briefly) Jeff Goldblum.

Wes Anderson’s films usually come with a bold helping of aloof dryness. While that element is certainly evident here, it is also undercut by some unexpected elements of warmth and humanity. Compared to, say, Anderson’s immediately previous feature The French Dispatch (2021), this feels a far more unified and expressive experience. It is still a deeply formal presentation – the camera essentially works at right angle shifts for the whole time – but it feels like more than a technical enterprise. There is romance here. There is joy. There is a deep, terrified uncertainty. As I have already noted, this is one of the good ones.