Film Review: THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME (Directed by Wes Anderson)

ANDERSON’S REPUBLIC OF OBJECTS

Something has shifted in Wes Anderson’s dollhouse universe. The Phoenician Scheme arrives with all the expected geometric precision, but underneath the familiar symmetries lurks an unfamiliar bite.

Arms dealer Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro) has survived six assassination attempts by the time we meet him in 1950. He’s a jaded oligarch attempting to reconcile with his estranged daughter Sister Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a Catholic novice who seems to exist in a different moral universe entirely. Their story might have been another of Anderson’s elaborate reconciliation fables, but something more corrosive is at work here.

With Bruno Delbonnel replacing longtime collaborator Robert Yeoman as cinematographer, Anderson adopts a 1.5:1 aspect ratio that compresses the frame into a visual theater, each shot resembling an overdetermined diorama. The film opens with a striking overhead sequence in a hospital bathroom. Delbonnel shoots from above while Anderson moves the action in slow motion, actors double-timing to produce a dissonant ballet. The result is uncanny (strange or unsettling in a subtle way), clinical, and deeply composed.

Anderson’s visual language has grown more coded, more pointed. Props aren’t decorative flourishes anymore; they’re arguments. Hand grenades get passed around like dinner mints. Business deals worth millions hinge on playground basketball variants. Real Renoirs hang beside obvious fakes, as if authenticity itself were just another commodity to be manipulated.

The most startling moment comes when Korda mentions, with the casual tone reserved for weather observations, that his grand infrastructure project will employ slave labor. The camera doesn’t flinch. The other characters barely register the comment. Life in this meticulously arranged world simply continues, as if moral enormity were just another design element to be managed.

Visually, the film is Anderson’s most subdued. Gone are the saturated pastels. In their place are dusty ochres, foggy greys, and sun-bleached deserts. The palette echoes the moral weariness of its characters. The opulence of Adam Stockhausen‘s production design is unmistakable, yet every space feels overmanaged, as if each location is silently suffocating from its own symmetry.

Benicio del Toro gives a performance of decaying charisma. His Korda is imperious and unreadable, a man who has amassed power but forfeited identity. Mia Threapleton’s Liesl flickers with restrained sorrow. She is compelling, though the script confines her to symbolic orbit rather than full interior life. In contrast, Michael Cera delivers his best performance to date as Bjørn, a private tutor whose oddness registers as both comedy and quiet subversion. His scenes with Richard Ayoade crackle with an anti-naturalistic rhythm that fits the world Anderson has built.

Alexandre Desplat‘s score leans into Stravinsky’s influence, centering motifs from The Firebird and Apollo. These pieces collide with Bach, Beethoven, and jazz greats like Gene Krupa and Gerry Mulligan. The music darts between diegetic and non-diegetic space, creating an unstable acoustic environment. This instability mirrors the film’s ideological terrain. Nothing settles. Everything shivers.

The film’s masterstroke occurs inside a mountain tunnel. Two locomotives face each other like opponents in some surreal standoff. Inside the cars, billionaires attempt to negotiate a massive infrastructure deal but find themselves separated by mere inches they somehow cannot bridge. The solution? A game of HORSE. The fate of billions rests on whether a Middle Eastern prince (Riz Ahmed) can sink an absurd basketball shot.

Watch this scene and you’re watching Anderson work through something deeper than visual comedy. The tunnel becomes a perfect metaphor for late capitalism’s claustrophobic deadlock. Those trains, once symbols of nineteenth-century optimism, now sit motionless, reduced to expensive toys in rich men’s games. The arbitrary nature of the basketball shot doesn’t provide comic relief so much as reveal capitalism’s dirty secret: that vast fortunes and human lives often depend on nothing more substantial than a coin flip.

The film’s historical references are deft. Korda’s name evokes Alexander Korda, the Hungarian émigré filmmaker whose glossy epics of the 1930s concealed political force within visual spectacle. Verbal nods to Michael Curtiz abound. A nightclub named Marseille Bob’s channels Casablanca and layered nostalgia. These citations operate not as trivia but as context, suggesting a lineage of artists who smuggled critique beneath the cloak of beauty.

Anderson does not simply reference history. He implicates it. Korda’s empire is a mirror image of Anderson’s own directorial apparatus. Both create perfect worlds. Both exert absolute control. The difference is what they choose to show. In this film, Anderson shows the violence that makes elegance possible.

The Phoenician Scheme troubles me in ways I’m still working through. The film achieves something I didn’t think possible: it makes Anderson’s precious aesthetic feel genuinely dangerous. When characters break through the camera’s frame in fits of rage, assaulting the fourth wall itself, the violation feels shocking rather than clever. These aren’t directorial flourishes. They’re moments when the carefully maintained surfaces crack and something rawer bleeds through.

I should mention the film’s flaws, which are real. The final act grows loose and meandering. The editing (Barney Pilling) loses its usual crispness. Continuity errors creep in. You begin to sense the enormous effort required to maintain Anderson’s usual perfection, and occasionally that effort shows through the cracks.

But these imperfections matter less than what Anderson has accomplished here. This feels like the work of a director finally willing to implicate his own methods in his critique. Korda’s empire mirrors Anderson’s filmmaking apparatus in uncomfortable ways. Both create perfect worlds through absolute control. Both treat human beings as elements to be arranged rather than individuals to be understood. The difference lies in what each chooses to reveal about the cost of such perfection.

By the film’s end, watching Korda stand amid the wreckage of his schemes, surrounded by beautiful objects he owns but cannot truly possess, I found myself thinking about Anderson’s own career differently. The Phoenician Scheme may not be his most accomplished film, but it might be his most necessary one. It shows an artist stepping into moral engagement without abandoning the very obsessions that made him distinctive. In Anderson’s republic of objects, everything has its place, everything serves its purpose, and everything—ultimately—reveals the emptiness at the heart of perfect control.

stills courtesy of Focus Features

The Phoenician Scheme
Focus Features
105 minutes | U.S. / Germany | English
in wide release
for cities and showtimes, visit Focus Features