Wes Anderson lobs a gentle grenade at his wonderfully meticulous worlds
I’ve loved seeing Wes Anderson’s style evolve from the offbeat yet realistic charm of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums to fully controlled, hyper-stylized worlds like The Grand Budapest Hotel and Fantastic Mr. Fox. But with Asteroid City, the fastidious auteur turned that control inward, crafting a self-aware story where characters and actors alike search for meaning beyond their carefully constructed confines. His composed whimsy collided with existential dread on levels moral and creative, exposing a raw tension between emotional truth and aesthetic precision.
The Phoenician Scheme pushes that tension further into remarkably explosive, morally charged territory. Anderson swaps petty squabbles for assassination plots and tenuous alliances between family and finance underscored by corporate greed, all amid his signature pastels. The film hums with a new, palpable anger, suggesting a director ready to blow up the world he so painstakingly built with a kindly tossed hand grenade. Yet even with its weighty themes and surreal detours painted with religion and regret, The Phoenician Scheme remains a wild, hilarious caper—playful, piercing, and unmistakably Wes Anderson.
After surviving yet another assassination attempt, global industry titan Anatole Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) yanks his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) from her remote convent, naming her his heir—on a “trial basis”—over her nine blood and adopted brothers. But the inheritance hinges on one condition: she must help him pull off his most audacious scheme yet—an ambitious infrastructure project in Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia, now at risk thanks to a market sabotage by Korda’s rivals and the U.S. government.
With awkward tutor Bjorn (Michael Cera) by their side, Liesl is thrown into a surreal crash course in Korda-style capitalism: shady deals, eccentric powerbrokers, and constant moral compromise. There’s just one problem: Liesl still believes her father murdered her mother. To earn her trust and secure his legacy, Korda must unearth the truth and expose the real killer—all by legal means only, of course.
Working with longtime collaborator Adam Stockhausen and legendary cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, Wes Anderson crafts The Phoenician Scheme as a sun-baked spectacle caught between construction and decay. The film blends Casablanca-inspired cabarets, crumbling European estates, and lush jungle refuges for exiled revolutionaries into a world that’s both glamorous and gaudy. Like The Grand Budapest Hotel, its opulence masks a more profound desperation, where towering dams and gilded halls feel like monuments to tenuous power. Characters like Korda, nightclub kingpin Marseilles Bob (Mathieu Amalric), and idealistic builder Cousin Hilda (Scarlett Johansson) all share a need to conquer their environments, seeking validation or protection from forces as abstract as legacy, guilt, or the marching progress of time. Their answers are varied, yet the impulse is all the same–and despite having all the money in the world to throw at their intentions, things still risk springing a leak or falling apart.
Anderson and Delbonnel’s biggest visual flourish lies in Bunuelian religious tableaux as Korda flits between life and death thanks to his myriad would-be assassins. Anderson’s afterlife is fittingly stripped of color – placed on a surreal heavenly trial, Korda must answer for his earthly sins without his usual colorful moral relativism at his disposal. Every waking return to Earth then becomes another opportunity for Korda to find such mortal clarity in his repairing relationship with his estranged, pious daughter.
The film’s ensemble is another menagerie of single scene-stealing appearances by new faces among Anderson’s cast of regulars, with hilarious standouts from evil bearded Benedict Cumberbatch, bombastic basketball-wielding baron brothers Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston, and a long-awaited turn by Cera as a gut-busting Andersonian equivalent of a bumbling, well-intentioned himbo. However, The Phoenician Scheme unmistakably belongs to Del Toro and Threapleton. Korda is a megalomaniacal evolution of Royal Tenenbaum, a blustering absent patriarch with the bravado and flair of Charles Foster Kane. Korda has the debonair air of Del Toro’s Collector from Guardians of the Galaxy, coupled with all the weasely grit of Javier from Traffic. Beneath the swagger lies a man rattled by mortality, watching his empire and legacy teeter on the brink. For Korda, family and finance blur: both are assets to manage, leverage, or lose. When the end looms, his true returns depend on where he invested his time, trust, and love as much as what he’s able to build and leave behind. In comparison, Liesl is a daughter whose refusal to compromise her deeper moral beliefs gives her confidence and agency that these older, seemingly wiser industry leaders can only adopt for show. Threapleton’s deadpan wit against Del Toro’s absurd declarations is a winning comedic combo, with both gleaning needed moral flexibility or renewed emotional resolve when forced into insane conflict with each other.
Amid The Phoenician Scheme’s sprawling moral desert, Anderson questions the value of scruples in a world run by emotionless billionaires who treat people as props—both in business and in his own painstakingly composed frames. The film confronts whether integrity can survive in a system where power trumps principle, and where even human connection is just another asset to exploit. Nothing speaks to this more than Korda’s hilarious hoarding of hand grenades, which he gives out to business partners like olive branches of mutually assured destruction, all of which are accepted with “you’re too kind.”
It’s fascinating to see a filmmaker like Wes Anderson, whose success hinges on such creative yet obsessive artistry, center a character like Zsa-Zsa Korda–who seems, at first, utterly indifferent to such refinement. Yet beneath the bravado, Korda yearns for connection beyond power. He hires tutors like Bjorn to teach him what he can’t buy, pores over books on collapsed empires and forgeries as an escape from the possibility of another plane crash, and collects masterpieces (only masterpieces)—perhaps hoping to understand their value beyond price tags. As The Phoenician Scheme unfolds, it becomes clear that for Korda, building dams and tunnels is how he sculpts or paints. But estranged from the emotional truths that real art both conveys and is necessary for creation, Korda’s unbothered when his medium includes slave labor or famine. Beauty, for him, is still just conquest in disguise, and leaving a legacy is just a way of conquering death one last time. The world is just another fastidious project.
That’s why The Phoenician Scheme feels like Anderson’s most self-indicting work yet. The creeping, fascistic indifference to art and beauty that lingered at the edges of The Grand Budapest Hotel has rotted into full decay in Korda’s world, while the existential despair of Asteroid City now stretches into cosmic judgment where values, not just actions, are on trial. Nowadays, Anderson seems consumed by the question: Why go on?
Why make art or hold faith in people when they both can be reduced to capital, or obliterated in an instant by corporate greed or a well-placed grenade?
Though Anderson’s films have always carried a bitter undercurrent, this is the first to let that bitterness literally bleed in copious quantities. The opening plane crash, staged with his signature precision and whimsy, is exhilarating in its absurdity yet truly shocking in its violence — a tricky emotional balancing act that only grows more complicated as the film progresses. People take bullets for each other as much as they self-explode. Chandeliers shatter for laughs, and bitter rivalries explode in scenic destruction. A bad contract is enough to stop someone from giving blood to someone else mid-transfusion. It’s so damn funny but so deeply sad, exposing the fragility of everything Anderson’s style tries to preserve.
The result is a film that’s riotously funny yet quietly devastating, one whose lovely humor struggles to offset the film’s sincere questions about its own worth. The Phoenician Scheme remains quite haunting and enigmatic, lingering as a reckoning more than a hilarious caper. There are still defiant glimmers of hope: a mid-credits declaration forbidding any usage of it to train AI serves as a necessary stand for creative agency, while the finale set in another picturesque Anderson setting strips away splendor to embrace chaotic simplicity.
That The Phoenician Scheme is polarizing compared to its director’s earlier films is no surprise. Hopefully, it marks the continuation of a bold new phase where Wes Anderson continues to blend joy with sorrow, artifice with sincere inquiry, and precision with profound unease.
The Phoenician Scheme opens in theaters on June 6th courtesy of Focus Features.
