Cannes 2025 Review: ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ is Shenanigans Over Sentiment

Part-espionage thriller, part-portrait of another of the director's dysfunctional families, the film is a visually stunning but distracted rumination on coming to terms with one's legacy.

Wes Anderson is, quite famously, a details guy. Perfect symmetry, immaculate composition, and absolute devotion to every tiny element of his dollhouse creations — his work (and that of his behind-the-scenes collaborators) is dazzling in its dedication to the little things. The Phoenician Scheme, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, is no outlier in this respect. It’s the kind of movie whose press notes include a reading list of all the fake books dreamt up for its protagonist’s library, plus five pages worth of detail on all its feats of production design (like securing real masterworks of painting for the shoot, including a Renoir once owned by Greta Garbo).

Impressive, undoubtedly — but for once, the balance feels a little off in this foray into Andersonland. Part-espionage thriller, part-portrait of another of the director’s dysfunctional families, the film is a visually stunning but distracted rumination on coming to terms with one’s legacy. Though it’s given some profundity by scattered bursts of emotion, much of the movie is too focused on satiating a boyish appetite for antics — and touring us around its sumptuous sets — for it to match the calibre of Anderson’s last offering, Asteroid City.

The film follows Anatole “Zsa-zsa” Korda, a ruthless tycoon played by Benicio del Toro and named as if Anderson put midcentury European high society into a blender. Zsa-zsa is so obscenely rich and powerful that he has no need for a passport or human rights (his words), and is so business-minded that he approaches fatherhood the same way he does the stock market: hedging his bets, he adds adopted sons to his troupe of biological ones to maximise the likelihood that one of them will turn out to be as clever as Einstein.

Zsa-zsa is about to embark on a huge, multi-pronged project to bring infrastructure to Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia and reap the resulting profits, but surviving his sixth assassination attempt has led him to decide he needs an heir. He has settled on his oldest child, estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), whom he stashed in a convent when young to keep her “away from boys.” But she throws a spanner in the works of his meticulously plotted scheme: she’s found religion in the convent, and vehemently objects to her father’s use of slavery and orchestrated famines to prop up his legacy-defining project.

The film’s labyrinthine plot is kicked off by the revelation that a secretive group of cross-nation bureaucrats, angered by Zsa-zsa’s blase attitude to their countries’ tax laws and “shared democratic goals,” have artificially driven up the price of “bashable rivets” to spite him. These tiny metal fasteners are the basis on which all of Zsa-zsa’s ambitious construction projects — a locomotive tunnel, inland waterway, and hydroelectric dam — are based, and so he sets out to convince his consortium of backers to increase their investments and cover the resulting “gap” on the balance sheet.

The scheme is a convoluted one, and so Anderson has broken it up for our benefit into the quaintest of parcels: individual shoeboxes, real objects glimpsed in the film that also delineate the film’s location-hopping chapters. Zsa-zsa, Liesl, and Michael Cera’s Bjorn — a Norwegian tutor the tycoon has employed — work their way through each of them, dodging a few more assassination attempts in the process. These sections form the bulk of the film, but do little more than provide a few droll chuckles and pad out its credits. Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Jeffrey Wright, Matthieu Amalric, and Scarlett Johansson do help invigorate Phoenician Scheme‘s overlong middle section, but Zsa-zsa’s extended escapades get a little tiresome by around Shoebox 3 ½.

However, the film’s antics-heavy second act is given some profundity by the growing romantic tension between Bjorn and Liesl, some supernatural intercuts, and a gradually deepening dynamic between del Toro and Threapleton’s characters. Though it’s breadcrumbed a little too sparsely throughout the movie’s caper portion, Anderson returns to the same theme here that’s always guarded his movies against style-over-substance complaints: the transcendence of love. As it turns out, Bjorn isn’t who he says he is, Liesl isn’t quite as sure of herself as she seems, and nor is Zsa-zsa as cold-hearted as he’d like to appear.

The film’s one sly gut-punch of emotion (as much an Andersonian hallmark as his immaculate mise-en-scène) comes by way of its father-daughter dynamic. After each foiled assassination attempt, Zsa-zsa experiences a black-and-white vision of life after death — sobering glimpses at his legacy that make him more amenable to Liesl’s moralising influence back on earth. His gradual softening is touching to witness, and Threapleton deepens the overall effect by signalling similar vulnerability underneath Liesl’s rather severe manner.

There is eventual poignancy to be found in The Phoenician Scheme, but it’s also not the kind of film that rewards thinking about too much. Anderson is clearly enamoured by the kind of figure Zsa-zsa cuts, and is hell-bent on trying to redeem him. By the movie’s end, it’s clear he feels this has been achieved, but it only takes a little post-credits reflection to burst his bubble: there are real and deeply horrible things churned up in the film’s backdrop, and the assumption that you can evoke and then plaster over all that exploitation with a father-daughter reunion is naive at best. But even if you excuse Anderson his boyishly ahistoric romanticism — to be fair, he’s never made anything that would lead us to expect anything different — the film is too much of an exercise in shenanigans to give it real poignancy. In short, emotionally, it’s something Anderson’s visual compositions have never been accused of being: asymmetric.