Death has always been central to Wes Anderson’s films. That might seem a strange thing to say when you consider the elaborately pretty candy-box aesthetic he favors, but it’s true. Just think of the gory fore arm-slitting suicide attempt — using the classic and correct vertical-slit form of suicide by exsanguination — in the middle of The Royal Tenenbaums. Think of how often Anderson uses a character’s demise to motivate or cap his series of amusing scenes, without ever disturbing the overall impression of amusement (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, Tenenbaums).

Consider that Anderson kills a beloved animal for laughs in almost every film. Usually it’s a dog, but in The Grand Budapest Hotel he switches it up and kills a cat. The corpse is carried away by his loving owner inside an impromptu bag made out of fine-looking cloth marred by a single, artful blotch of blood. Then the owner, played by Jeff Goldblum with his usual self-amused irony, passes a garbage can on the street and abruptly tosses the bag into it with a slapstick comedy thump.

It was at that moment that I became officially sick of Wes Anderson, and of the gleeful laughter in the theater that accompanies every Wes Anderson-ish move he makes. The audience even anticipates the move he’s going to make and begins guffawing ahead of time, just to be sure to appear maximally Wes-savvy.