The Phoenician Scheme 2025 Parents Guide

The Phoenician Scheme is Rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Rating (MPA) for violent content, bloody images, some sexual material, nude images, and smoking throughout.

Review: The Phoenician Scheme

Something’s happened to Wes Anderson. And no, it’s not just the usual “he’s gotten older and more refined” kind of shift. It’s more like he’s gradually traded in his soul for symmetry. Once the cheeky maestro of meticulously framed whimsy—remember the raw, beating heart beneath The Royal Tenenbaums? The wild charm of Rushmore?—Anderson has now become a curator of immaculate, soulless dioramas. With The Phoenician Scheme, he doubles down on his signature style to the point of self-parody, delivering a film that’s beautiful to look at but dead behind the eyes.

Let’s be clear: the craftsmanship is top-tier, as always. The cast is stacked. The production design is so obsessively detailed you could spend the entire film just scanning the wallpaper patterns. But what used to be quirky and emotionally resonant now feels embalmed—frozen in a museum of Anderson’s own making.

The Phoenician Scheme Story

Set in 1950, The Phoenician Scheme follows Korda (Benicio del Toro), a tycoon who survives yet another assassination attempt and decides it’s time to reconnect with his estranged daughter, Liesel (Mia Threapleton), just as she’s preparing to become a nun. Naturally. He offers her his fortune if she’ll join him on a convoluted quest to financially exploit the fictional country of Phoenicia. This involves meetings with everyone from a prince (Riz Ahmed) to a cousin (Scarlett Johansson) to someone named Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric) and Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch). Oh, and there’s Michael Cera as a science tutor tagging along, for some reason.

There’s a lot happening. On paper, the film is packed with potential for satire, chaos, and heart. But what we get is a slow-motion farce—overstuffed with ideas, underpowered by any real pulse. Even the jokes feel like they’re being delivered through a translator who’s also a tax accountant.

The film opens with an actual explosion—Korda is blown apart in a plane bombing, only to miraculously survive. In the aftermath, he meets the “Biblical Troupe” (Willem Dafoe and Bill Murray in glorified cameos) who confront him in some celestial holding zone. It’s surreal, sure—but also curiously lifeless. Anderson stages these scenes with the emotional detachment of someone arranging figurines in a display case. It’s all there: the clever visuals, the deadpan dialogue, the historical window dressing. But there’s no heart behind the glass.

Anderson wants us to follow Korda as he scrambles to pull off “The Phoenician Scheme,” a vaguely defined capitalist dream involving contracts, corporate courtship, and a literal shoebox plan. Along the way, he tries to bond with Liesel, who might not even be his daughter—and who believes he may have killed her mother. It’s heavy material, or at least it should be, but you wouldn’t know it from the tone. Everyone speaks in the same affectless monotone, like they’re afraid any real emotion might smudge the pastel color palette.

There’s even a sequence where contract disputes are settled via a game of HORSE, played on a jungle basketball court. You can practically hear Anderson smirking behind the camera—except it’s not funny, it’s not thrilling, it’s not anything. It’s just… there.

What’s frustrating is that Anderson clearly still has ideas—plenty of them. There are communist rebels, hand grenades wrapped like gifts, theological interrogations, blood transfusions, and a mystery involving Liesel’s true parentage. But the more he adds, the less any of it matters. It’s like watching someone frantically rearrange the pieces of a puzzle they never really intended to finish.

By the time we reach the end—and what a non-ending it is—The Phoenician Scheme has fully collapsed under the weight of its own quirk. There’s no emotional climax, no catharsis, no revelation. Just another beautifully composed shot, like the final brushstroke on a painting that was never meant to move you.

Wes Anderson used to make films that made you feel something—bittersweet joy, melancholy, giddy wonder. Now, he makes films that make you admire them… from a distance. The Phoenician Scheme is technically dazzling, but artistically hollow. And for a director who once captured the aching beauty of dysfunctional families and lost innocence with such precision, that’s a real tragedy.

The Phoenician Scheme 2025 Parents Guide

Violence & Peril: Surprisingly, yes — there’s actual violence here, although it’s stylized within Anderson’s quirky, dollhouse-like aesthetic. The movie opens with a literal bombing, and I won’t sugarcoat it: the main character is torn in half (visually stylized, not gory, but still jarring). He survives, which somehow makes it weirder, not less intense. There are assassination attempts, threats of jungle warfare, and a handful of sudden moments where things feel precariously close to serious danger — though they’re always defused by the film’s deadpan tone.

Still, some kids might be unsettled by the surreal treatment of death and injury. The film’s flirtation with the afterlife and morality plays out in strange, philosophical scenes that feel less “cool dream sequence” and more “existential therapy in a cathedral.”

Language: Remarkably clean, actually. No f-bombs. A few mild, era-appropriate insults, maybe a “damn” or “hell” here or there, but nothing that would make a parent clutch pearls or reach for the remote. Anderson’s dialogue is more interested in cadence than crudeness.

Sex & Romance: Very little to speak of, which is standard for Anderson’s work. No nudity, no romantic subplots, no steamy tension. There is a reference to a deceased mother and some vague adult relationship history, but nothing shown or described in detail. Honestly, it’s as chaste as a Victorian pen pal correspondence.

Thematic Elements: Here’s where it gets a little more complex. The Phoenician Scheme is drenched in themes of legacy, trust, moral compromise, and that murky territory between redemption and manipulation. There’s a strained father-daughter relationship at the heart of it — and the lingering suspicion that Dad may have, you know, murdered Mom. That kind of weight hangs over the story, even if it’s delivered with Anderson’s signature detachment.

The movie doesn’t resolve these threads in a neat way, which could frustrate younger viewers. It asks big questions about ethics and mortality, but doesn’t offer much emotional clarity. Some teens will find that fascinating. Others might find it empty or confusing. You know your kid best.

Drug/Alcohol Use: There’s a dinner scene or two where wine is present, and one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment involving medicinal use, but nothing glamorized or central to the story. Not really a factor.

Final Thoughts

So — is The Phoenician Scheme okay for your teenager?

If your teen is the kind who devoured The Grand Budapest Hotel and asked for a Criterion subscription for their birthday, they’ll likely appreciate what Anderson’s doing here, even if they feel a bit let down by the coldness of the narrative. But if your kid is more into fast-paced adventures or films with a clear emotional arc, this might be a long, confusing sit.

As a parent, I’d say this: there’s nothing overtly harmful here, but The Phoenician Scheme is more intellectually challenging than emotionally nourishing. It won’t traumatize your teen — but it might bore them, or worse, leave them with a strange, unresolved feeling they won’t quite know how to describe.

Then again, maybe that’s Anderson’s point.