Wes Anderson’s latest directorial The Phoenician Scheme begins with a plane crash and ends with Bill Murray as God. In between, there are adopted children playing chess with grenades, a nun negotiating global business deals, and a man named Zsa-zsa Korda trying to decide if his soul is beyond saving.

The Phoenician Scheme has Anderson doing what he does best: symmetrical sets, deadpan delivery, and a carousel of Hollywood stars playing strange people in stranger outfits. It’s all absurd, like Anderson’s filmography, and deliciously engaging.

At Kolkata’s Forum Mall on Elgin Road, one of the few multiplexes screening the film, seats are filling up faster than one might expect for a whimsical art-house comedy.

Among those in the audience on Tuesday was 23-year-old Arnab, an art student from Belghoria who travelled across the city for a matinee show. “I couldn’t miss this one,” he said. “Anderson’s worlds are like moving paintings. I just wanted to see it — how he frames his shots, uses colour and space”.

“Wes Anderson’s films are quirky,” said Sandeep Mukherjee, a 53-year-old entrepreneur from South Kolkata. “But there’s a warmth underneath all that style. For a couple of hours, you forget the real world.”

Benicio del Toro plays Korda, a wildly powerful businessman with a habit of cheating death. After surviving six assassination attempts, he begins to wonder if it’s time to name a successor and possibly do some soul-searching along the way. His chosen heir is his daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a nun with no interest in corporate empires but plenty of moral clarity.

Together, they embark on a globe-trotting adventure, trying to stitch together a more ethical version of Korda’s empire. Along the way, they meet a cavalcade of characters — a princely investor played by Riz Ahmed, eccentric brothers (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston), a nightclub owner in Marseille (Mathieu Amalric), and a deranged Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch).

And then there’s Michael Cera, who delivers a scene-stealing turn as a socially awkward tutor with a hidden agenda. He is funny and also strangely poignant, a perfect match for Anderson’s bittersweet tone.

“I came for the low ticket prices,” admitted a 19-year-old student at the same screening, who didn’t wish to be named. “I didn’t expect to love it this much. I think I grinned through the movie.”

That’s the thing about The Phoenician Scheme. At first it feels like a barrage of dialogues delivered with deadpan humour — all style and performance. But as the story unfolds, there’s something deeper pulsing beneath the eccentricities. It becomes a story about legacy, about regret, about whether someone who’s done a lifetime of damage can begin to make amends.

Anderson, co-writing with long-time collaborator Roman Coppola, keeps the plot intentionally fuzzy. The film stumbles in places, especially when the dialogue gets too loaded with corporate jargon. But then, out of nowhere, you’re hit with a scene that’s so bizarre and beautiful that logic feels irrelevant.

In one running gag, every time Korda nearly dies, the film cuts to a vision of Heaven, where Bill Murray, playing God, offers cryptic commentary about morality. These biblical interludes build up to an exploration of guilt in a flawed human being.

The Phoenician Scheme may not rank among Anderson’s masterpieces. It lacks the emotional ache of The Royal Tenenbaums, the melancholy of The Life Aquatic, or the satirical sharpness of The Grand Budapest Hotel. But it lingers in its peculiar way.

“Anderson never disappoints,” Arnab sums it up.