It’s the most fully realized world of any Wes Anderson film, and just like Avatar, the story is a travel guide through the world as much as the world is a gateway for the story. Each meticulously planned out frame is filled with impeccable set design, a Kubrickian eye to detail, and astounding in-shot choreography that even the laziest viewer couldn’t miss. For example, a character enters the frame, performs a complex action, leaves the frame, then the camera will quick-pan (suddenly change directions without cutting) and further actions are performed with acute precision. The effect is one of overwhelming realism. This is ironic, because Grand Budapest takes place in a fictitious Eastern European nation called The Republic of Zubrowka. There are constant allusions to history throughout, from fascism to communism, making the setting and events of the film instantly recognizable for audiences. Sometimes this is for comedic effect, but far more often it’s for a much more serious goal. The film’s setting, with all its rampant political symbolism, lets Wes tell a story he couldn’t have if he grounded the movie in reality. Satirizing real-life Nazis hasn’t been in vogue since Indiana Jones, no matter how hard Guillermo Del Toro tried to resurrect that trope with Hellboy. Instead, its authenticity is of a kind totally unique to Wes Anderson himself. This is similar to many of his films, like the imaginary New York in Royal Tenenbaums, only intensified tenfold.

There’s a high-intensity chase sequence late in the film that might make his fans do a double take. Or they would if it wasn’t executed almost entirely in stop motion photography like The Nightmare Before Christmas or Coraline. Many of the scenes that take place outside are actually captured with the stop motion method, certainly a trick he perfected from Fantastic Mr. Fox. These sequences should seem artificial and contrived, pretentious even, but they aren’t treated as anything other than what they are: a natural part of his made up whimsical world.

Beneath the rich aesthetics is his most fully developed setting and story, with many interconnected moving parts that may be difficult to fully digest on a first viewing. Really, the film has as many as five plot-arcs running at the same time, collapsing and expanding on each other with the same fluidity as Chris Nolan’s Inception. It’s complex without ever feeling like you missed the essential details, it’s just that you’d want to return more than once to absorb them all. There are stories within stories within stories, not to mention the moving parts in each layer of the narrative. If you’ll notice, this is a recurring theme in Wes Anderson’s films except, maybe, his last. Rushmore opens and ends with a theater curtain, and you begin to wonder if Rushmore the film is just another one of Max Fischer’s plays. The Royal Tenenbaums is a book read to the audience, and The Darjeeling Limited has a character who, against his best intentions to write fiction, ignorantly and accidentally writes about his life instead. In Grand Budapest, some of those things are repeated, and just as the setting of Zubrowka exaggerates Wes’ habit of making alternative worlds for his stories, the story-within-a-story element is exaggerated as well.