Wes Anderson returns with The Phoenician Scheme, a fast-paced, visually rich tale of power, faith, and family—balancing style with fresh narrative energy.

Filmmakers tend to slow down their production flow over the course of their careers, and some manage to accelerate it, like Wes Anderson over the last five years. Just over a year and a half after his series of short films on Netflix and Asteroid City, the filmmaker is back with The Phoenician Scheme, presented at Cannes and released in cinemas a few weeks later.

There’s always a part of the mystery already solved when you go to see a Wes Anderson film: the symmetrical aesthetic, the eccentricity and the speed of his narrative are motifs so recurrent in the director’s work that their presence is no longer a surprise. And this is what earns the filmmaker both criticism and praise, with audiences increasingly weary of this repetitiveness, and on the other hand the singularity of Anderson’s vision that immediately places him as one of the rare auteur filmmakers, in an age when filmmakers’ vision is often flattened when it comes to mainstream films.

Regardless, The Phoenician Scheme moves away from the desert of New Mexico to follow the financial, political and family adventures of Zsa Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro), an unscrupulous businessman on the verge of completing his ultimate project against all odds of economic shenanigans and assassination attempts.  All with the half-hearted help of his daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) and insect tutor Bjorn Lund (Michael Cera).

With a much more straightforward narrative than his previous film, but just as fast-paced, Anderson returns with this film to a more engaging dynamic for viewers, with an adventure chaptered around different locations, characters and actions. Although the story can quickly become muddled, the objective remains clear: to convince each of his unscrupulous friends to finance his project. In this way, the interest of The Phoenician Scheme no longer rests entirely on its story, but on the dynamics between the characters, whether it’s in a business tie-up between Zsa Zsa and Prince Farouk (Riz Ahmed) ending in a game of hoops against investors Reagan (Bryan Cranston) and Leland (Tom Hanks), or a family confrontation with his daughter, who discover each other in this adventure. Emphasis is also placed on dialogue and the energy put into the power relations between the characters, serving as a driving force for both drama and comedy.

But deep down, there’s a darker confrontation at work in Zsa Zsa’s near-death experiences. A confrontation with himself and the afterlife, his soul’s place in paradise with his loved ones, or those who wish to accept him. Each time, questioning more and more the morality of his actions and his Christian beliefs. This plurality of themes gives The Phoenician Scheme a pleasing richness and underlying substance, although the film struggles to develop it fully.

Nevertheless, in addition to the usual visual richness of these films, this time Anderson seems to dig a little deeper to even out the dynamism of his actors and narrative. This is particularly the case with Zsa Zsa’s near-death experiences, shifting the color palette to raw black and white, and experimenting with negatives and jump cuts. This is also the case during the trio’s adventures, where the filmmaker breaks (slightly) from his obsessive symmetry for unusual shots that invite us to understand the questioning and incomprehension of our characters. To say that Anderson is renewing himself visually is a step we wouldn’t take. On the other hand, in addition to the pleasing symmetrical color aesthetic, there are uncontrolled moments that, like a perfectly balanced object suddenly tilting, pique our interest.

In an aesthetic and narrative we know by heart and have already experienced, Wes Anderson finds a way to hold our attention and tell us his new story. However, The Phoenician Scheme retains the same shortcomings as his previous works, with a story that’s sometimes muddled and characters that are often underdeveloped, despite having well-known faces attached to them like Cousin Hilda (Scarlett Johansson) or Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch). With each new film, the question arises as to whether this will be the one that represents the breaking point between Anderson and the public, and The Phoenician Scheme manages to postpone the deadline until another time.