Every Wes Anderson Film Ranked Worst To Best

This is perhaps the Wes Anderson film with the most effort put into its production design. The titular hotel is nothing short of marvellous, both in its luxurious inner sets and the intricate model that serves as its exterior in wide shots. Like so many Anderson locations before it, this feels like somewhere you’d want to visit, and it makes the lives of the people who work inside it all the more compelling to watch.

The film is told in a novel-like flashback structure, through a girl reading a book called The Grand Budapest Hotel. The book’s author stays at the hotel, now on its last legs, and meets a man called Zero who identifies himself as the owner. Zero then tells of the time he spent with Gustave H., the hotel’s former concierge.

The epic tale that unfolds is full of laughs and heart, as Gustave is presented as a man who defends the hotel and its staff quite literally to his dying breath, as the fictional nation of Zubrovka is overrun by fascist forces in the mid twentieth century.

His final fate stands as a painful ode to all those who know that there are still “faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity”.