Film Reviews ·Oct 02, 2025

The Phoenician Scheme Review

by You Can't Go Back

As someone whose first real interest in indie films came from watching Rushmore and Bottle Rocket I have a particular affinity with Wes Anderson films. The first time watching those films I remember feeling genuinely elated. Films could be like this?!? Nothing really in the mostly mainstream gloop I’d watched up to that point suggested you could push films in outlandish and satisfying ways. However, I’ve not felt anything close to that whilst watching his more recent films.

What's Wrong?

I think the main issue is how un-relatable and detached from reality the characters have become. With early Anderson films there would be real recognisable individuals, who would occasionally transcend into caricature of themselves, for comedic effect, to show more of themselves, but fundamentally they felt ‘human’ . Max Fischer, Steve Zissou despite being outlandish characters felt real and relatable.They were fallible and perhaps more importantly vulnerable to life's complexities.

In its basic form ‘They could be sad* (*insert any emotion) because someone died* (*insert event). This seems to be missing from all Wes Anderson's recent films, characters are now permanently in caricature mode and ‘life complexities’ make zero impact on them, or the story. This, to me at least, leaves it all feeling intensely sterile.

Zsa-Zsa" Korda and ‘The Plot’

The Main character here is Zsa Zsa Korda played by Benicio del Toro, who must have one of the most cinematic heads in the history of cinema. You could film him doing nothing and you’d think, “Yeah, I'm watching something here”. Sadly they do do something with him and it's not great.

His character is a not particularly likeable, extremely rich, capitalist who we are supposed to care whether or not he gets some other rich capitalist to agree to a business deal. That's the plot. I simply did not, at any point, care about this. Why would I? I’m not sure you necessarily need to be rooting for someone for a film to work.. But there isn't enough else to hang onto either. As hardly any of the characters seem real, or human, the consequences of their actions become meaningless. There is a fight to the death at the end, and at no point did I care about the outcome. They are dead? Okay. They are alive? Okay. It literally meant nothing either way and I’d be very surprised if anyone watching it did. Again, why would they? What’s frustrating is it wouldn’t have been hard to bring life to this film. It's a conscious decision to not.

Visually Speaking

As seems to be the pattern Anderson leans further into a visual world where everything looks a certain way and sadly less into story or characters that feel alive . There's an appreciation you can feel watching this, at how well it's been crafted (though less than with The French Dispatch), but it isn't enough. It's getting to the point where it almost feels like the next Wes Anderson film could be made by AI and I wouldn't notice, such is the increasingly stylised regurgitating of the same thing.

The 'Ensemble' Cast

Continuing the ‘regurgitating of the same thing’ theme - The film features the usual ensemble cast - but maybe that's not right. Ensemble suggests, to me at least, equal screen time but here like many of his recent films, it's more just a long list of successful actors that have been squashed into, I guess, to make the film more impressive? They on the whole add very little.

Again it's another element that makes these films less believable, repeatedly reminded that “oh that's Bill Murray, or that Scarlett Johansson, oh that's Charlotte Gainsbourg” - taking you out of the film and making it all seem detached from whatever it's trying to be. The only cast member I didn't know was Zsa Zsa's daughter ‘Liesl’, played by Mia Threapleton ; Who is this unknown? In a revelation that will shock no one who is aware how talent gets you nowhere unless your parents have a wikipedia page, she is Kate Winslet's daughter.  Not sure if it's intended or not but it seemed like she’d been asked to play a Wes Anderson version of Amelai Dimoldenberg of Chicken Shop Date fame. 

Out of the five or so business associates Zsa-Zsa is trying to persuade, there is very little to distinguish between them. One was French, one was black, one was female, one was two men… But aside from that, very little to differentiate. Again why would I care if they get the deal or not?

Where In The World?

I may need to rewatch to get a more solid sense, but it seems the film is situated in a kind of proxy middle east going by ‘Phoenicia’. Set during a kind of post imperial land grab is happening, I guess before the independent nation states formed. There are maps shown throughout the film, but they don't seem to make much sense of place or link up with the scenes that follow them. For some reason I always presumed all the plane crashes were happening in South America! There weirdly is no ‘peoples’ of these lands, or at least they are never shown. This leaves you with no sense of any of it existing. Kind of like a dream that you realise makes no sense whilst you're dreaming it.

What Next?

I was discussing the disappointment of this film with a friend and he suggested the only way Wes Anderson makes a good film again is if someone takes away all his money and connections and makes him live a normal life for a while. This feels accurate. He seems to have taken so many steps down the road of ‘twee insincerity’ that his films are starting to resemble the films that tried, and failed, to rip him off in the 2000s. Fingers crossed I am being unfairly negative here and the next film blows me away.