I Recognize That Assassin

Ryan Bedsaul writes on “The Phoenician Scheme” and Wes Anderson’s late style.

By Ryan BedsaulJuly 12, 2025

• Film

IT’S BECOME CRITICAL tradition to crown each new Wes Anderson movie the most “Wes Anderson” thing he’s produced to date. First it was The French Dispatch—“the most Wes Anderson movie […] ever made,” according to Vulture upon its release in 2021 (ditto Entertainment Weekly, ditto ScreenRant, ditto The Daily Beast). Then, in 2023, the filmmaker Paul Schrader advanced that title to Asteroid City, one it held until Men’s Journal caught sight of the trailer for his latest film, The Phoenician Scheme, and insisted this new entry was shaping up to be “the most Wes Anderson thing ever.” In a ranking of his films, from least to most “Wes Anderson-y,” Collider more or less confirmed this trend by situating his four latest films among the top five spots on the list.

Describing Anderson’s films in such recursive terms seems to imply that, as a director, he is only capable of magnifying the traits that distinguished his work from that of other up-and-comers in the late 1990s: the symmetrical compositions, color-coordinated set design, quirky title cards, and melancholic protagonists. It’s a line of thought that recalls Pauline Kael’s critique of auteur theory—that “repetition without development is decline.” But watching Anderson’s early work alongside The French Dispatch, Asteroid City, or The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More (2024), it’s hard to characterize his more recent films as simply more of the same. There’s a distinct gap, after all, between Rushmore (1998)—a low budget film about an enterprising prep school reject—and The Phoenician Scheme, in which an indomitable billionaire embarks on an epic quest to finance an infrastructure project as world governments and a host of assassins conspire against him.

The difference between these two premises alone underlines one major shift in Anderson’s career: from a focus on insular family units, small-scale capers, and minor romances to sweeping historical fictions centered on great magnates and visionaries. For Anderson, I suspect, this turn to the halls of power is partially an excuse to explore new thematic terrain without compromising his aesthetic fixations. He isn’t leaving the cloistered family dramas of his early work behind so much as situating them in a broader social and historical context.

The Phoenician Scheme, in fact, did not begin in the halls of power. According to Anderson, it began with the image of a European business tycoon played by Benicio del Toro. The movie is structured as a series of meetings in which del Toro’s character, Anatole “Zsa-zsa” Korda, tries to renegotiate the terms of a contract with his business partners after a panel of world leaders artificially inflates the cost of the “bashable” rivets his enterprise depends on. Accompanying him on this quest is his estranged daughter, Sister Liesl (Mia Threapleton), to whom he has promised to bequeath his fortune should his enemies kill him before he can complete his work. The result is a film that builds on Anderson’s early fascination with broken family units but also allows him to examine the moral contradictions at the heart of Zsa-zsa’s business empire, not to mention this particular era in postwar capitalism.

So how did we get here? Arguably, the real pivot in Anderson’s career takes place around The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), which considerably broadened his storytelling scope. Isle of Dogs (2018), The French Dispatch, and Asteroid City all deal with subjects of similar historical consequence and thematic weight. In place of the real-world locations that mark stretches of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), The Darjeeling Limited (2007), and Moonrise Kingdom (2012), Anderson in these later films embraces a more contrived approach to production design, in which every element appears intentionally placed to communicate a greater sense of historical (and biographical) detail. This maximalist impulse is on display in something as seemingly frivolous as the title cards in The French Dispatch, which feature long columns of text from articles referenced in the film’s chapters (the text disappears before one could possibly read it). A similar density of information marks the entire mise-en-scène; viewers may only glimpse—sometimes in briskly edited montage—the series of paintings, book spines, elaborate furnishings or architectural embellishments that fill the frame.

In addition to this new level of aesthetic contrivance, Anderson’s recent work has also embraced more direct-to-camera, rapid-fire deliveries of exposition. Increasingly, he resorts to breaking the fourth wall, telling as much as showing—or rather, telling while showing. These techniques are most apparent in the Henry Sugar shorts, where Anderson essentially eschews dialogue altogether in favor of direct narration. (In one episode, Dev Patel’s narrator recites Dahl’s text back to the camera as he chases Ben Kingsley’s blindfolded character up and down hospital corridors.) It’s just one example of a tendency present in Anderson’s later work: to make no bones about the artifice of the filmmaking on display. In both Henry Sugar and Asteroid City, we see actors removing makeup, crew members misplacing props and striking sets, actors rehearsing lines and mistiming cues.

While this meta-cinematic inclination is on display in some of his earlier films (see Bob Balaban filming his own narration in Moonrise Kingdom), it reaches its apex in Asteroid City. Briefly, Asteroid City is a television broadcast of a play, depicted as a film, which occasionally cuts away to tales of the play’s inception, providing behind-the-scenes glances of its production and creative methodologies along the way. Around the film’s climax, the actor playing Augie (Jason Schwartzman) experiences a loss of faith in his performance and exits the movie through a back door that leads onto the stage where the play Asteroid City is being performed and filmed for television. From there, he retreats to a balcony and encounters an actress (Margot Robbie) who stars in another play at a theater next door. We learn that she was supposed to play the ghost of Augie’s wife in Asteroid City but her part was cut. When Augie asks her to remind him of her cut scene, she proceeds to recite the dialogue from it, providing us as audience members the emotional closure the play denies to the character.

The delivery of those lines in this manner, outside of their original narrative context, forces the viewer into a position of supplying the emotional content of the play, rather than relying on the dramatic performance of the scene to evoke its significance. In effect, this scene poses a question about the possibility of constructing meaning within a cold, indifferent universe by looking beyond the various approaches to truth-seeking embraced by the fictionalized characters in the play Asteroid City—all of whom have chosen vocations that prioritize emotional or scientific discovery. For Anderson, the truth must lie in some external perspective that can synthesize these disparate viewpoints into a meaningful whole. The open question is where one locates that external perspective. The actor? The aliens? The viewer? The director? God?

Similarly metaphysical moments occur throughout Anderson’s oeuvre, as when Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) encounters the jaguar shark at the end of The Life Aquatic. The difference, though, is one of address. While Zissou’s encounter has an obvious emotional resonance for the character—providing him with a blunt metaphor for all of his personal failures—Asteroid City’s meta-moment seems designed for the viewer. It does not resolve the meaning of Augie’s grief so much as raise the question of its significance. The movie doesn’t do the math for audiences; it trusts them to supply an answer for themselves.

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In general, the meta-aesthetics that mark Anderson’s late work invite more participation from the audience by continually reminding them of the contrivances he and his crew have crafted to tell their story. In other words, his style has reached a point where it begins to call the substance it depicts into question. Such questioning occurs in The French Dispatch, whenever the magazine writers take liberty with their reporting, but is more fully realized in the Henry Sugar shorts, whose narration often contradicts the action on-screen. Repeatedly, the film calls attention to its own artifice; when Henry Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch) announces the passing of time on a stopwatch, viewers become aware that it is passing faster for him than for them. (“Five seconds, five seconds, five seconds.”) In more conventional Hollywood fare, such self-conscious choices would violate the expectation of total narrative immersion. But in dispensing with such expectations, Anderson asks his audience to participate in his film’s construction alongside the performers. In this way, his late work has more in common with art-cinematic traditions that depart from that anxious Hollywood maxim—to avoid cutting the viewer loose with a moment of superfluous action or narrative ambiguity. It’s no surprise that the influences Anderson cites include François Truffaut, Luis Buñuel, and Francesco Rosi, whose film The Mattei Affair (1972) helped inform the plot of The Phoenician Scheme.

In The Phoenician Scheme, Anderson blends these art-house influences and meta-cinematic touches into a newly “violent and death-haunted” aesthetic that marks each frame as Zsa-zsa confronts his own mortality over and over again. After a shocking explosion at the beginning of the film sends Zsa-zsa’s plane careening into a cornfield—a crash he miraculously survives, much like the pilot of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946)—a sense of danger follows him everywhere. Anderson embraces this danger as a running visual gag in every scene: the sharpened toy arrows Zsa-zsa’s disgruntled heirs shoot at him in his dining room, the poison he finds in his wineglass, the gauze pads and bandages that mar his suave appearance. Although he is surrounded by constant reminders of his mortality, Zsa-zsa insists that he is unfazed by these threats. “Myself, I feel very safe,” he says.

Anderson’s filmmaking suggests otherwise. The Phoenician Scheme’s style seems designed to dramatize Zsa-zsa’s moral conflict by substituting the meta-cinematic narration in his more recent films with a metaphysical framework provided by surreal dream sequences. After every near-death experience, the film launches him into a black-and-white heavenly plane where his conscience is put on trial. In one of these fantasies, Zsa-zsa carries an arrow-strewn elk to a panel of judges in the celestial courtroom, drops the animal on a marble slab before them, and cuts down the length of its neck. As the wound opens, gold coins flow out of the elk and spill onto his feet like a sacrificial offering. It’s a haunting image—not the kind one would expect of a Wes Anderson movie. Same with the color-negative effects that light up the screen as the judges glare at Zsa-zsa. These dreams are matched in tone by other images in the film: plane wreckage, brute industrial projects, arid desert landscapes, sepulchral mansion hallways, a pit of quicksand. Like every insured treasure in Zsa-zsa’s possession, they remind viewers of the armed conflicts, forced labor, and famines that paved the way for the character’s success. Together they are like the specter of Death that follows Antonious Block throughout The Seventh Seal (1957). As Zsa-zsa says on more than one occasion, “I think I recognize that assassin. He used to work for me maybe.”

As Alex Harrison suggests in his review for ScreenRant, there is even a meta-cinematic way of reading the gap between the material fruits of Zsa-zsa’s labor and the moral weight of his actions, which comes to the fore when one of his confidants is revealed to be an undercover spy. After processing this realization, Liesl, Bjørn (Michael Cera), and Zsa-zsa exchange confessions that reveal their distinct modes of self-presentation to be nothing more than fragile facades built from a foundation of childhood passion and disappointment. Harrison insists this is Anderson’s way of conspiring against his characters for their own good. Considering the significance the film assigns to Zsa-zsa’s crimes, I’m inclined to agree. All of this, it seems to me, is a far cry from the twee reputation that precedes Anderson and that so much of his later work belies.

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Two years ago, a TikTok trend seemed to insist on the predictability of Anderson’s style by making apparent how any amateur with a smartphone and 10 minutes could evoke his aesthetic through stable framing, a few curios, and music borrowed from an Alexandre Desplat score. But this trend is about as indicative of the ease of replicating Anderson’s cinema as unofficial Studio Ghibli AI images are for replicating Hayao Miyazaki’s work (i.e., not at all). Yet the same vending machine variety of complaints remains. Plug in a quarter and make your selection: Anderson’s work is “deadpan,” “adorable,” a collection of “meticulously decorated dollhouses.” These sorts of remarks rely upon a superficial interpretation of Anderson’s work that neglects to consider how the style of his films definitively shapes their substance.

Compare The Phoenician Scheme—Anderson’s version of a Great Man fiction—to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023). Watching Nolan’s work, viewers get an authoritative impression of the subject, one that says, “This is real, this is how it happened; admire the history, admire my rendition of it.” Watching Anderson’s, one feels a deeper engagement with both the characters and the historical forces they’re caught up in. He never pretends that the grand narrative he’s telling is anything other than artifice, which, paradoxically, makes it feel truer.

I’m not sure The Phoenician Scheme is a masterpiece on the level of Asteroid City or The Grand Budapest Hotel. But with it, Anderson has once again recalibrated his style, this time to tell a father-daughter story that is also a tale of state-subsidized capitalism, international espionage, imperialism, Christian morality, and the military-industrial complex. Perhaps the usual complainers will indeed find, as the Christopher Wool painting says, “the harder you look, the harder you look.” But there’s a lot to be learned from looking, rather than preemptively judging. Anderson’s career may have begun with a more cloistered focus on the cinematic frame, but his style since then has evolved to accommodate new historical and ideological frames as well.

With The Phoenician Scheme, he has once again pushed the boundaries of what it means to be a Wes Anderson movie. This time, it happens to mean a historical epic that follows a wealthy mediator of clandestine trade agreements, his devout daughter, and the entomologist who accompanies them as they traverse an internationally contested desert landscape. Along the way, characters grapple with urgent ethical and theological questions against a backdrop of mausoleumesque mansion walls, violent visual art masterpieces, Stravinsky needle drops, and slapstick assassination attempts. Now try telling me you’ve seen something like that before.