Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City goes where he never has before.

Eleven films into a 27-year career, the writer-director Wes Anderson has by now found his audience. Or maybe you’ve stopped watching Anderson films altogether, contenting yourself with the TikTok memes that reproduce his characteristic hypercomposed frames and playful soundtracks to make moments from users’ everyday lives look and sound vaguely Andersonian. Sure, there are matte paintings of mesas in the background and saguaro cactuses that are clearly cutout props, but there’s also a vast expanse of empty space, filmed in long, swiveling pans to establish the fact that we’ve entered a different representational zone, a movie inside a play inside a TV show that, for the characters existing within it, constitutes a world as real and as maddeningly inescapable as our own. Earlier on, in an exchange between Schwartzman’s stoic war photographer and Johansson’s equally tight-lipped movie star, she describes them as “two catastrophically wounded people who don’t express the depths of our pain because … we don’t want to.” His reply, after a moment of consideration: “Let’s change the subject.” In Anderson’s breakthrough second film, Rushmore, a teenage Schwartzman played a precocious high schooler trying and often failing to connect with his grief for his late mother. He responded that his friends knew better than to send him these links, having been advised that he would immediately erase them: “I don’t want to see too much of someone else thinking about what I try to be because, God knows, I could then start doing it.” Haters may sneer that it’s too late, that Anderson’s films have been parodying themselves for some time now.