What would it look like if, rather than arriving at the isolated and off-season Overlook Hotel, The Shining‘s Jack Torrance had rocked up to the symmetrical, pastel-coloured confection that is Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel? An unlikely question, to which we now know the answer, thanks to a very successful mash-up by London-based filmmaker Steve Ramsden, who noticed the similar ways in which the two directors framed their shots.
The dark, slow-building anxiety of Stanley Kubrick’s sparse 1980 psychological horror film has been re-paced with the addition of perfectly matched scenes from Wes Anderson’s swift-moving, late-60s alpine murder mystery. Monsieur Gustave H., the matter-of-fact concierge from the Grand Budapest, explains to his protege that, “our guests know their deepest secrets – some of which are frankly rather unseemly – will go with us to our graves,” before the film cuts to chilling scenes at the supposedly empty Overlook Hotel, including the strange and terrifying contents of room 237.