June 9, 2025 · Watch the official trailer
There's a kinetic vibrancy to a Wes Anderson film that feels exceptionally unique in cinema.
With a cavalcade of rich color palettes, eccentric characters audaciously dressed, or biting and dry scripts. audiences have clear expectations for what they may be in for with an Anderson film regardless of what the movie is about.
In this regard, the plot of “The Phoenician Scheme” doesn't particularly matter.
It portends itself to be a tale of a seemingly unkillable businessman desperate to make his industrialist dreams come true at any cost. And yet all of the business minutia has little to no impact on the actual storytelling involved.
Rich in thematic nuance both overt and subtle, “The Phoenician Scheme” is more about a man coming to terms with the inevitability of his mortality and creating a relationship with his estranged daughter.
Though the film features a traditional star-studded Anderson ensemble cast, it's almost truly more of a two-handed film.
Benicio Del Toro plays Zsa-zsa Korda, a part written specifically for the veteran character actor, whose gruff physical exterior and ability to portray nuance with sly comedic timing is key to making the film click despite the denseness of its narrative. Del Toro has made a career playing rather unscrupulous characters and his ability to win audiences over convincingly is a balm to the overly dry, cynical nature of the narrative as a whole.
Relative newcomer, Mia Threapleton, daughter of Oscar winner Kate Winslet, is a revelation as Liesl, a young woman seeking to find answers to her personal family history before taking the vows of a nun. Her ability to not only thrive in Anderson's largely stoic dry humor but carry a presence that does not become overwhelmed by Del Toro's magnetism balances the film and fundamentally changes the adventure audiences are led on to become something much more layered than one might expect from such a stiff comedy.
It's somewhat astonishing that Michael Cera has never been in an Anderson film before as his natural brand of staccato performance is uniquely adept for this type of screenplay and his eccentric turn as the film's main supporting character Professor Bjorn is the perfect introduction for the actor to enter the world of Anderson.
Cera’s ability to almost hide in the background of scenes and appear out of nowhere for casual memorable one-liners is superb and highlights just how deep of an ensemble. Anderson and his team have found for “The Phoenician Scheme.” A film that uses cinematic royalty like Tom Hanks as the 10th or 12th most important character in a film and mostly relegates him to a bizarrely humorous game of horse extenuates this even further.
“The Phoenician Scheme,” like all recent Anderson films, invites audiences to be drawn in with a keen eye in order to catch all of the exact details of the visual spectacle that the film's locations, production design, and costumes provide. In fact, there's so much to each little frame of the film that it may take a second viewing in order for viewers to get away from the dense narrative and become more comfortably immersed in the world of the film.
The textures that production designer Adam Stockhausen brings have a 1950s cinema era style to them that isn't just in keeping with the locales that the film is set in, but the ways in which a Hollywood production of the era might shoot the same script.
Where “The Phoenician Scheme” falls a touch flat is the overwhelming number of motifs that are packed into every page of screenplay. And while there is a brisk pace to the film broken out into different segments as Zsa-zsa and Liesl meet with different business partners to broker a new deal, several segments feel so superfluously thrown together in the editing bay that the entire film has a disjointed, uneven feel narratively.
Though it is not among Anderson’s best, “The Phoenician Scheme” does have his signature auteur vision in spades and those who get where the eccentric filmmaker is coming from will certainly find pleasure with this film.
Lesser fans of his work may struggle to connect with a film that doesn't allow for an ease of accessibility, though the lead performances from Del Toro and Threapleton could prove worth taking a chance on in theaters.
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