The Grand Budapest Hotel

The Grand Budapest Hotel: Wes Anderson's Style (Review)

Wes Anderson's style in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) is influenced by German expressionism. Anderson uses color, composition, acting, and camera movement to express emotions and ideas. The color sometimes signifies the historical background and the cultural atmosphere of the scenes. The composition puts the characters and the objects in the frames that express their relations to the characters' subjectivity and the world's objectivity. Anderson's dialogues are funny, narrative-oriented, and well-structured. His popular thematic elements such as family problems and father-son/daughter relationships can be also found in the film.


The influence of German expressionism is recognizable and clear from the beginning of the film. The hotel setting is gloomy, dark, and desolate. Zero Moustafa is a mysterious character, and we don't know anything about his past. His story is told in flashbacks. His room in the hotel is small that gives the audience a sense of claustrophobia and entrapment. In the flashback, the violet color of the uniforms of the Hotel workers may represent the vitality and the liveliness of the European cultural period after the First World War. The red and pink color of the building and its interior decoration have associations with the sense of life that exists into the Hotel and its environment. At the same time, the cleanliness and the order of the setting in the hotel reminds us how M. Gustave is in control of everything. Andersons' characters are not psychologically complicated creatures in the film, but his villains can be interpreted as the parody of German expressionist monsters such as Vampire and Golem in Jopling’s (Daniel Defoe) appearance and behavior.  Dimitri (Adrian Brody) is also ruthless and a psychopath. His character like any other German expressionistic villain is frightening and scary, but his weakness in controlling the situation and overcoming Gustave's intelligence effeminates him and takes out of him all the forces of his masculinity. The father-son relationship between Moustafa and Gustave is counterbalanced by the relationship between Dimitri and his mother. Review: By Morad Sadeghi