It’s easy enough to parody Wes Anderson’s visual aesthetic, with all its symmetrical compositions, God’s-eye views and dollhouse fashions. Harder to imitate is the zing and snap of his dialogue. A typically lively example, from this year’s “The Phoenician Scheme”:

Bjorn Lund: (holding a bomb) Is this supposed to be here? I found it under the lunch trolley.

Zsa-zsa Korda: How much time does it have?

Lund: Eighteen minutes.

Zsa-zsa Korda: Fine. We land in 10. I feel perfectly safe.

Anderson’s characters deal with their rococo world with wry humor and intractable logic, belying his reputation as a fussy auteur and putting the lie to the idea that he’s a vibes-first director.

“I just turned my brain off and looked at the visuals,” said someone else returning from the same screening of “The Phoenician Scheme.”

I hope they go back and see it again with their brain on, because there’s a lot to chew on under the surface of this seemingly slight and frivolous caper.

Benicio del Toro plays Zsa-zsa Korda, a craven industrialist who’s cavalier about his use of slave labor and orders murders as casually as one might order a martini. Like so many Anderson protagonists, he uses his detachment as a defense mechanism against having to feel anything, but as his dreams become haunted by divine tribunals and the fear of death creeps in, he starts to fumble crudely toward something resembling spirituality. His clumsy attempts at self-improvement occur as he orchestrates an increasingly bizarre scheme involving the nation of Phoenicia, set somewhere in the Middle East (perhaps next to Khemed, from the “Tintin” books).

In a movie slathered head to toe with pseudo-Egyptian decor that seems to have been obtained at a Cheesecake Factory auction, the death god Anubis has a curious way of making appearances, not least in the name of Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), Korda’s brother. (“He’s not human, he’s biblical,” Korda says.) We also meet a more conventional Abrahamic God played by Bill Murray, and a positively Shakespearean skull shows up in a few scenes as a memento mori.

All these images point to what the movie is really about: how our actions in life determine how we’ll be judged after death, either by those we leave behind or by whatever forces await us in the afterlife. Anderson wrote the script with Roman Coppola, a member of Hollywood’s most famous Catholic clan; their answer to the question of how to enter the kingdom of heaven lines up neatly with Christ’s, if not necessarily that of the fundamentalists who claim to speak for him.

Small wonder that the film’s other main character is a nun, an estranged daughter of Korda’s played by Mia Threapleton, who deals with her father’s lies and evasions by asking simple and inescapable questions. Living in a convent all her life as opposed to the hieroglyphic world the other characters occupy, Liesl seems to have winnowed her personality down to a frightening purity of morality and logic. About 70% of her dialogue consists of questions. The rest are zingers, many directed toward Lund (Michael Cera), an endearingly dorky entomologist hired to tutor Korda in his moments of downtime between morally dubious schemes.

If you’re a movie nerd, the name Korda might recall Alexander Korda, auteur of the great 1940 fantasy film “The Thief of Bagdad,” whose iconic matte paintings seem to have been repurposed for decor in a bar the characters visit. Set in 1950, the movie explodes with midcentury globetrotting chic — old boys’ magazines filtered through “Indiana Jones,” with postcards of historic monuments filling the screen during lyrical interludes.

The plot is typical espionage convolution, which makes it a little bit more difficult to care about certain scenes: why the protagonists are playing basketball with Riz Ahmed’s Prince Farouk in an abandoned train tunnel, for instance, or the specifics of Korda’s betrothal to a distant cousin. But unlike the fundamentally irrelevant conspiracy in David Cronenberg’s “The Shrouds,” there’s actually a logic and reason to the titular scheme, and it’s worth revisiting the movie to work out the details lost in the sheer density of dialogue and detail that splatters the screen.

This is far from Anderson’s best film, but does every film he makes have to compete with his others? The mistake would be to see it as nothing more than goofy entertainment, a breather following 2023’s weighty “Asteroid City.” It’s not slight. It’s biblical.