The Menu

Revenge is a dish best served with foam and a slightly split emulsion

Ralph Fiennes offers Anya Taylor-Joy a taste of revenge in The Menu.

Eleven guests wait on a dock for a ferry that promises to take them to the ultimate dining experience. Their destination is The Hawthorn, a restaurant located on a private island that is so exclusive it only seats 12 or fewer for every service. Every item eaten is grown, harvested, or hunted on the island. The staff of devoted chefs and servers live in dormitories and spend their days prepping and their nights serving. The head chef is world renowned gastronomy wizard Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), who is known as an innovator and harsh taskmaster when it comes to the kitchen.

It’s a hot ticket, and at $1,250/person, a meal that comes at a dear cost to many.

Tonight’s guests think The Hawthorn is worth the price. Rich couple Anne and Richard (Judith Light and Reed Birney) are frequent visitors who value the sense of exclusivity. A trio of business bros have finagled their way onto the guest list so they can brag about their clout. Down-and-out actor who’s never named (John Leguizamo) drags his assistant along, hoping to turn the experience into a pitch for a food and travel show. Poison-penned food critic Lillian Bloom (Janet McTeer) and her sycophant editor are hoping for a meal they can pick apart to show their superiority. Foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) is vibrating with excitement at the chance to show off his knowledge in person to chef Slowik. His date, Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) is a last-minute addition to the guest list after Tyler’s date cancelled.

And Margot is soon regretting taking Tyler up on his dinner invitation. Slowik begins service promising a memorable evening, but Margot is unimpressed with foams on a plate and high concept snow on a charred leaf. She’s also unsettled by Slowik’s service, though all of the other customers seemed charmed. They begin to see Margot’s point, however, when a tarp is rolled out on the floor.

It seems after a lifetime of pushing himself and his staff to culinary extremes to stay ahead of the zeitgeist, Slowik has designed a truly impressive menu, and one that may be a bit too interactive for the guests.

Season two of The Bear is INTENSE, y’all.

A movie that will convince you DoorDash is the safest way to enjoy food, The Menu is a satire that offers a delicious blend of comedy and violence (stick with me, I’ll try to limit the restaurant/food puns). Director Mark Mylod takes great pains to serve up an absurdist romp that takes the concept of Eat the Rich to new and deranged levels. The movie feels like a combination of Ready or Not, Gosford Park, and Midsommar, but while that seems like a lot, the film pulls off its dangerous lunacy with aplomb.

The Hawthorn’s name even evokes a sense of danger. Hawthorn trees are technically shrubs that produce beautiful berries frequently prized in herbal teas and jams. Unfortunately, they also produce wicked thorns that can stab anyone trying to collect them. There’s a danger to seeking out pretty food, even in nature. Interestingly there’s also a psychological term, The Hawthorne Effect, which outlines how people change their behaviors when they’re aware of being observed. This is certainly true in The Menu where both the chefs and the guests are putting on a show to cover up what’s really going on with them.

Mylod and writer Will Tracy are experienced in exposing the hilarious evils of the upper echelon with their work on Succession, and they continue in the same vein here, making each dinner guest just awful enough that you think eh when Slowik and his team start skewering them verbally and physically.

But Mylod isn’t just picking at wealthy patrons being overly demanding and never satisfied, he’s also interested in the cult that forms around celebrity chefs. Slowik is, essentially, running a cult — complete with the Jim Jones dormitories his sous staff sleep in. His second in command Elsa (Hong Chau) has the quiet menace of a devotee that will do what it takes to fulfill the commands of Slowik. The chef claps at the beginning of every course, the ringing noise startling the guests but immediately drawing his staff up to absolute focused stillness. It’s eerie watching the whole kitchen halt with military precision at the sound of a clap.

And Ralph Fiennes is a very compelling cult leader. He offers up a pitch-black comedic performance that’s at once chilling and laugh-out-loud amusing. His Slowik has been beaten down by the success he thought he wanted. It’s not enough to enjoy cooking and produce good food, he must innovate! He must push the envelope! He must create milk snow or the critics will tear him apart for daring to serve food they’ve seen before. His success is the death of his love for his craft. It’s both a tragic truth for many artists and a commentary on the idea that critics and aficionados often dismiss the good in favor of the new, based on little more than their need to tear it down. This movie could be seen as a bloody alternate universe Ratatouille, where critic Anton Ego isn’t brought back from the brink.

The other wild card in the bunch is the mercurial Margot, who is a last-minute date for the obnoxious Tyler. Her presence seems to throw off Slowik and his staff, who have carefully curated the guest list. But because Margot hasn’t been clamoring for a seat at Slowik’s table, she’s also the only honest diner among the guests. She scoffs at a course that is “bread without bread”. She’s uninterested in molecular gastronomy. She just wants food that’s delicious. And her appetite might be enough to upset the whole menu. Taylor-Joy is great here, sparring with Fiennes as both try to figure the other out. She holds her own and makes Margot the one person we don’t want roasted — figuratively or literally.

And while the film is a satire, The Menu is designed to sate the appetite, not challenge the palate. The people who are being skewered are all perfectly awful — the absurdly wealthy, the obnoxious, and the mean-spirited. There’s never a moment when the subject on the chopping block isn’t absolutely worthy of their fate. But it would have been interesting to delve a bit more into the staff helping to ensure Slowik’s vision, especially Chau’s commanding Elsa. But as Frasier’s Niles Crane once said: What is the one thing better than an exquisite meal? An exquisite meal with one tiny flaw we can pick at all night.

Yes, I know I’ll be invited to The Hawthorn for the next seating.

Verdict: A delicious bit of satire that’s sure to delight those with a dark sense of humor.

The Menu is rated R and available in theaters November 18.