Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme: What to expect from the espionage thriller

The details suggest something different — but how different can Anderson really be? The Phoenician Scheme is the follow-up to Asteroid City (2023) and The French Dispatch (2021), both of which divided audiences on whether Anderson was deepening/sharpening his storytelling or merely refining his signature quirks into something so distilled that it became self-parody. With The Phoenician Scheme, there’s a promise of something else: a noir-inflected labyrinth where the usual melancholic whimsy is replaced by intrigue. The real question is whether Anderson, who has a distinct vocabulary of his own, can let his world breathe in the shadows, or whether this is just another meticulous tableau — this time with spies?

Benicio del Toro: The centre of the universe

Anderson’s love of ensemble casts is the stuff of legend, but The Phoenician Scheme has an unusual twist: Del Toro in every shot. Will the film be structured around a single perspective — an Andersonian riff on the subjective realities of Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)? Or is this simply a technical challenge, a stylistic flex that ensures even the framing remains controlled down to the molecular level? We have seen Del Toro in Anderson’s world as a volatile, tortured artist in The French Dispatch (2021). Alongside him, there will be Mia Threapleton (as Sister Liesel) and Michael Cera (as her tutor, Bjorn Lund) in what Anderson has called a “three-hander adventure.” Will this film be about inheritance, about the ways power leaks from one generation to another, reshaping the world in the process?

Also read: Asteroid City and the artistry behind Wes Anderson’s quirky, whimsical cinematic universe

Anderson’s casting choices often function as a shorthand for tone. When Bill Murray — he has acted in almost every Anderson film, except Bottle Rocket (1996), his debut — we expect a wry, lived-in sorrow. When Owen Wilson or Jason Schwartzman appear, we prepare for intellectual absurdity. This time, Anderson assembles a mix of old collaborators and surprising newcomers. Scarlett Johansson returns after her standout performance in Asteroid City, this time joined by Riz Ahmed, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Richard Ayoade. Willem Dafoe, long rumoured, may be slipping in as well. Bryan Cranston, Jeffrey Wright, Tom Hanks, Rupert Friend, and Charlotte Gainsbourg round out the cast.

The question is: does Anderson challenge them? His dialogue is often so precisely mannered that performances become an exercise in cadence rather than complexity. But espionage, secrecy, deception — these are themes that require characters who change, who operate in the liminal spaces between what is said and what is meant. If The Phoenician Scheme is to truly break away from Anderson’s most polished instincts, it will need to let its actors just be.

A different shade of whimsy?

Anderson’s work has always carried an undercurrent of darkness, but it is usually a wistful kind — the melancholy of time’s passage, of love lost or never quite found. His films tend to deal in the sadness of small things rather than the machinations of great power. But espionage demands something else: paranoia, danger, the possibility of real consequence. Can Anderson deliver stakes? His films rarely allow for narrative tension in a traditional sense; they are mechanisms where the pleasure is in the detail, not the propulsion. But espionage is a genre of movement — of betrayals, reversals, changing loyalties. It is a genre where actions matter, where a character’s choices ripple outward in real and devastating ways. If The Phoenician Scheme does all this, it could be Anderson’s most surprising film yet. If it remains trapped in his meticulously composed world, it may be just another addition to, well, ‘the dollhouse aesthetic.’

Also read: Wes Anderson-inspired reels: Whimsy, melancholy beneath the candy-floss world

Visually, Anderson’s commitment to stylisation is part of his DNA. With The Phoenician Scheme, we can perhaps expect something in the vein of The Grand Budapest Hotel, but darker, more angular. Since Roman, Anderson’s writing partner on Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and The French Dispatch, returns, there is a hope that the script will bear the same interlocking structure and literary flourishes as their last works. Alexandre Desplat is on board for the score; one can expect a musical backdrop high on orchestral elegance as well playful subversion. Everything about The Phoenician Scheme suggests a familiar evolution: new themes, but the same exacting control. The real test will be whether Anderson can surrender some of that control to the genre itself — to the messiness, the danger, the unknown.

The Phoenician Scheme is, on the face of it, a new direction for Anderson. The themes — espionage, wealth, deception — suggest a film that goes for suspense instead of nostalgia. Everything about it that we know so far hints at a bold formal experiment. But Anderson’s great strength has always been his weakness: his absolute, unerring control. His films are wind-up toys, exquisite and precise, but they rarely stumble. And espionage is a genre built on stumbles — on characters out of their depth, on mistakes that spiral into catastrophe. If Anderson allows The Phoenician Scheme to truly breathe — to let tension build, to let silence mean as much as words, to let a performance shift unbidden — it could be his most radical film yet. If not, it will be another beautiful object, another marvel of craft. And we will marvel at it. But will we feel it? May 30 will tell.