THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME

An Ornate Puzzle of Family, Espionage, and Perfect Symmetry

There’s always been something museum-like about a Wes Anderson film, a world behind glass, immaculately arranged. But with The Phoenician Scheme, his latest and perhaps most intricate effort, that frame begins to crack. And what seeps through is something stranger, sadder, and more elusive. 

The story orbits Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), one of the richest men in Europe, who finds himself in the centre of a quiet geopolitical mess. When his estranged daughter (played by Mia Threapleton), a novice nun with a complicated inheritance, returns to his life, it triggers a cascade of bureaucratic entanglements, emotional reckonings, and historical echoes that feel like they’ve been waiting centuries to reemerge. Michael Cera plays a Norwegian entomologist hired to educate Korda’s nine sons, a premise that sounds absurd, but in Anderson’s hands, it works like clockwork. Bryan Cranston and Tom Hanks turn in unexpectedly tender performances as two older brothers locked in a decades-old rivalry involving basketball, memory, and a failed utopia. 

The ensemble, which also includes Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Riz Ahmed, and Richard Ayoade, is uniformly strong; even when characters only appear briefly, they land like annotations in an ancient text. Shot in soft sun-drenched hues and dusky interiors, the fictional setting, a faded port city somewhere between Alexandria and Trieste, is one of Anderson’s most visually rich yet. Every hallway, harbour, and office feels both lived-in and theatrical, as if the past is always hovering a few inches above the present. 

 If Asteroid City was a film about storytelling, The Phoenician Scheme feels more like a film about rewriting, about the delicate politics of who gets to author history, and what’s conveniently left out. There’s no real villain here, only a dense paper trail of motives. The narrative resists clarity. We aren’t given a satisfying resolution, and that feels intentional. What stood out most to me, aside from Alexandre Desplat’s gorgeous, off-kilter score, was how quiet this film is. Anderson seems less concerned with punchy visuals (though they’re still there) and more with a kind of slow-burning ambiguity. Some might call it indulgent. Others will recognise it as a director at the height of his control, loosening his grip just slightly. 

The Phoenician Scheme premiered at Cannes this year to warm, if slightly puzzled, acclaim. It’s not the crowd-pleaser some might hope for, but it doesn’t try to be. Instead, it’s something rarer: a meditative, beautifully crafted artefact that invites the viewer not to solve it, but to sit with it.

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