19 May REVIEW – ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ is deeply stylised but often leaves you feeling emotionally stranded
There’s a moment halfway through Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme when Benicio del Toro’s Zsa-Zsa Korda turns to his estranged daughter and gravely declares, “This is the most important project of my lifetime.” It’s a line meant to underline the sweeping ambition of Korda’s globe-spanning infrastructure scheme, but it also feels like Anderson speaking directly to us through his character. His latest film is a deeply stylised, impossibly dense, and at times deliberately opaque offering that aims for both grandeur and introspection.
It’s packed with ideas, stacked with stars, and constructed with the kind of obsessive precision that only Anderson could manage. But somewhere along the way, it also begins to collapse under the weight of its own cleverness. This is a film that looks immaculate and sounds profound, but often leaves you feeling emotionally stranded. And yet, for all its indulgences and eccentric detours, it’s hard not to admire the sheer audacity of the thing.
Set in the Balka Flatlands in 1950, The Phoenician Scheme begins with a fiery plane crash and a bleeding organ in hand—literally. Zsa-Zsa Korda (del Toro), a reclusive business magnate with a flair for the dramatic, has survived his sixth brush with death. It’s a familiar occurrence in his world, one where assassination attempts arrive with the regularity of breakfast. Played with weary swagger by the Oscar winner, Korda is a man too arrogant to die, a corrupt industrialist with nine sons he ignores and one daughter he’s now calling upon to be his legacy.
His distant daughter, Liesl (a star-making turn from Mia Threapleton), is a soon-to-be nun with a conscience and a simmering suspicion that her father may have been responsible for her mother’s death. When Korda offers her control of his empire and invites her to accompany him on a final tour of his business dealings, Liesl agrees, but not out of sentiment. Her motives are both practical and personal. What follows is an episodic, globetrotting journey that flirts with espionage, family melodrama, and economic satire, all filtered through Anderson’s signature diorama-like framing and mannered dialogue.
As Korda attempts to finesse, deceive, or outright bully his various business partners into reducing their stakes in the eponymous Phoenician Scheme—a massive infrastructure project involving tunnels, dams, and railroads in a fictional region—Liesl, Korda, and their nervous traveling companion Bjørn (a delightful Michael Cera) navigate a series of increasingly surreal encounters. Business negotiations become basketball games. Assassins lurk behind every corner. A symbolic hand grenade becomes a recurring gift. Characters debate morality, inheritance, and theology, often in the same breath. And when Korda brushes death again, as he often does, the film shifts into black and white to stage celestial courtroom scenes presided over by a deadpan Bill Murray as God. It’s a lot, and then some.
Visually, this is easily one of Anderson’s most sumptuous films to date. Bruno Delbonnel, stepping in as cinematographer for Anderson’s perennial collaborator Robert Yeoman, gives the film a gothic grandeur that’s more sombre and shadowed than Anderson’s previous works. His black and white sequences are strikingly composed, adding a layer of old-world solemnity to the film’s more metaphysical musings. The production design from Adam Stockhausen is characteristically intricate: every room feels curated, every costume immaculate, every frame meticulously balanced. Alexandre Desplat’s score adds a sense of operatic drama that underscores the absurdity. There’s a sense that every second of screen time has been sanded and polished into place. It’s an overwhelming visual feast, the kind that demands a second and third viewing just to absorb all the detail.
The performances, as always, are a blend of deadpan delivery and quiet pathos. Del Toro brings a rumpled charisma to Korda, a man who is equal parts tragic and ridiculous. His line deliveries are mumbled, tossed off, but occasionally punctuated by moments of real sincerity. Threapleton is the real surprise here. As Liesl, she holds her own against a cast of heavyweights and becomes the emotional anchor of the film. Her performance is understated but resonant, and her scenes with del Toro have a muted tension that feels more grounded than much of what surrounds them. Cera , shockingly appearing for the very first time in Anderson’s troupe, does his usual neurotic stammering to good effect, though his character feels somewhat underwritten.
Elsewhere, the cast is a who’s who of Anderson regulars and new recruits: Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston play a pair of smarmy American tycoons who settle business disputes through sporting contests. Scarlett Johansson shows up as Cousin Hilda, a weary idealist with a monologue about utopia that lands harder than expected. Riz Ahmed, Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, and Benedict Cumberbatch all drift in and out of the narrative like particularly well-dressed chess pieces, each given just enough material to leave an impression without overstaying their welcome.
It’s difficult not to admire the scope of Anderson’s ambition here. He’s working on a massive canvas, one that draws from European postwar paranoia, Biblical allegory, and even family sitcoms. There are moments where you can feel him grappling with questions about legacy, morality, and forgiveness, and the film occasionally gestures toward something genuinely moving. A scene between Korda and a dying rival quietly explores the futility of power. Liesl’s crisis of faith adds a welcome emotional throughline. And the celestial courtroom sequences, while absurd on the surface, point toward a deeper reckoning with guilt and consequence. At times, The Phoenician Scheme seems to be arguing with itself about what kind of film it wants to be.
But here’s the thing: it’s not always fun to watch. As meticulously crafted as it is, the film often feels cold and overstuffed. Anderson’s screenplay is so packed with ideas, characters, and narrative detours that it rarely allows any moment to breathe. Scenes begin with a flourish and end with a shrug. The pacing is erratic, the structure episodic to a fault. There’s an inertia to the storytelling, a sense that Anderson is more interested in clever compositions and cryptic dialogue than in dramatic momentum. At barely an hour and a half, it feels longer, not because it drags but because it refuses to build toward any real emotional crescendo. The ending, when it arrives, is both sudden and anticlimactic.
More frustrating is the sense that the film is so wrapped up in its own elaborate construction that it forgets to connect. While some of Anderson’s best work (The Grand Budapest Hotel, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Royal Tenenbaums) balances style with heart, The Phoenician Scheme often leans so far into abstraction that it feels hollow. The characters talk about love, death, and redemption, but rarely seem to feel them. There are touching moments, yes, but they’re buried beneath layers of artifice. Even the emotional arc between Korda and Liesl, which should ground the film, is kept at arm’s length. There’s a scene where she asks him directly if he killed her mother, and his answer (neither a confession nor a denial) feels like a thematic dodge rather than a cathartic payoff.
That said, it would be unfair to dismiss the film outright. There’s a great deal of pleasure to be found in its eccentricities. The absurdist humour lands more often than not, and Anderson’s comic timing remains razor-sharp. Visual gags are layered into the frame, punchlines are delivered with dry precision, and even the most bizarre narrative detours are laced with wit. A sequence involving a heist orchestrated by revolutionary schoolteachers (led by Richard Ayoade) is equal parts ridiculous and inspired. The film’s political subtext—about corruption, legacy, and the ethics of empire-building—remains relevant, even if it’s delivered in Anderson’s typical register of detached whimsy.
Ultimately, The Phoenician Scheme is a film you may respect more than love. It’s an overambitious, at times alienating, but frequently dazzling work that continues Anderson’s evolution into one of cinema’s most singular stylists. It may not be his most accessible film, or even his most successful one, but it’s a testament to his refusal to play it safe. He’s digging deeper here, asking harder questions, and while the answers may be obscured by layers of pastel and pageantry, the intent is clear. This is a film about what we leave behind, who we leave it to, and whether any of it really matters in the end. Is it a masterpiece or a joke? The answer, perhaps, is that it’s both. And maybe that’s the point.
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Cast: Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rupert Friend, Hope Davis
Directors: Wes Anderson
Producers: Wes Anderson, Steven Rales, Jeremy Dawson, John Peet
Screenplay: Wes Anderson
Cinematography: Bruno Delbonnel
Production Design: Adam Stockhausen
Costume Design: Milena Canonero
Editor: Barney Pilling
Music: Alexandre Desplat
Running Time: 105 minutes
Release Date: 29th May 2025 (Australia)