The Menu review: Anya Taylor-Joy and Ralph Fiennes deconstruct the art-thriller

This was the first review to be published with Menu’s premiere at the 2022 Fantastic Fest. It has been updated and republished for the movie’s theatrical release.

One of the most-discussed movie scenes of 2021 reads like an unplanned prequel to Mark Mylod’s black, bloody comedic thriller Menu. In Michael Sarnoski’s Pig, chef-turned-backwoods-recluse Rob gently eviscerates the chef of a ritzy haute cuisine restaurant, who also happens to be one of Rob’s former employees. In Rob’s view, the other chef betrayed himself when he abandoned his dream of owning an intimate, comfortable pub, in favor of serving elaborately deconstructed food to snobs who mostly care about how much it costs. “Every day, you wake up and there’ll be less of you,” Rob tells the chef, who looks devastated — but not like he disagrees. “You live your life for them, and they don’t even see you. You don’t even see yourself.”

Menu feels like the next step in that story, if the hapless high-end chef had decided to turn Rob’s revelation outward against his clientele instead of inward. Menu mocks the kind of people who would eat at that restaurant Chef Rob despises, with its “emulsified scallops” and “foraged huckleberry foam, bathed in the smoke from Douglas fir cones.” But it also finds a little humanity in them as well. The most fascinating thing about this movie is how the filmmakers manage to make every target look ridiculous.

Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Margot, a last-minute date for rich foodie obsessive Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), who’s secured a seating at an exclusive restaurant on a private island, headed by the renowned Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). Margot doesn’t care about the kind of food Chef Slowik serves, such as a few artfully spaced blotches of sauce on a plate, billed as a cheeky “breadless bread course.” But Tyler is obsessive about Chef Slowik’s work, and the possibility of earning his attention and interest. They’re an odd couple from the start, with a strange tension between them that suggests secrets waiting to be revealed.

Image: Searchlight Pictures

They aren’t the only ones with secrets. There are also a gossipy food critic (Janet McTeer), her assistant (Aimee Carero) as well as a trio loud techno boors, who boast about expensing dinner fraudulently. A couple older than Margot may be among them. Then there’s Chef Slowik, who’s planned a dangerous “menu” for the evening designed to bring the secrets to light.

How far Chef Slowik is willing to go, and what’s going on with Margot, make up most of the complications in Menu If it doesn’t, the story might be just a grim, familiar revenge tale aiming at certain easy targets, rich, entitled and rude people who are self-satisfied. If there weren’t more going on under the surface, Menu would risk coming across as a fancy version of one of those teen slashers that’s more about watching symbolically obnoxious, shallow young people getting mown down by a killer.

Instead, Seth Reiss and Will Tracy’s script doles out the revelations with a careful sense of pacing and escalation, keeping a balance of sympathies between victims and mastermind. They clearly don’t expect the audience to entirely throw in with the people paying $1,250 apiece for a minimalist dinner, mostly for bragging rights about the experience. They don’t leave their victims as ciphers, either. Margot naturally gets center stage, and Taylor-Joy gives her a fierce, brittle “I’m totally over this nonsense” energy that makes her a compelling protagonist. Hoult delivers a strong performance, as Hoult is forced to confront his pretensions in an especially painful manner. But each character in turn gets a little stage time, including Chef Slowik’s dedicated assistant, Elsa (Hong Chau, fresh off The WhaleThe 2019 villain is most notable, however. Watchmen series).

Fiennes is an excellent asset as well. As a cult leader, Fiennes guides the action at the restaurant and puts on a kind, thoughtful face whenever it fits the story. For other scenes, however, he brings his cold psychopathy down to the table. Trying to guess what’s under his surface is one of the movie’s bigger challenges, and one of its biggest joys, mostly because he’s scripted and performed as a villain with a few sympathetic wrinkles, a man who courts empathy and evokes horror at the same time.

Photo: Eric Zachanowich/Searchlight Pictures

Menu This often looks like an expanded version of a one-set play. It’s where people are pulled closer and begin to crack under the pressure, which leads them to reveal more about themselves. A lot of what keeps it going isn’t that stagey energy, but the staging itself. production designer Ethan Tobman was inspired by everything from Luis Buñuel’s devastating 1962 film The Exterminating Angel (another film about smug elites who can’t escape each other) to German expressionist architecture. He and cinematographer Peter Deming give the film a harsh, punishing chilliness that emphasizes both the lack of comfort or warmth in haute cuisine and the state of Chef Slowik’s mind. It’s an appropriately sumptuous and sense-driven film, with something striking to look at in every frame.

Menu doesn’t always add up, though. There’s a strange unwillingness to commit to the film’s Grand Guignol potential, likely out of a desire to keep the cast around for the final act. There’s a disconnect between Chef Slowik’s hatred of his guests and the level of their comparative crimes, some of which are far more personal and meaningful than others. The film’s contempt for arrogance and entitlement is straightforward and satisfying, but when other motives start driving the story, like Elsa’s jealousy over Margot or Chef Slowik’s rage over not having each of his dishes remembered, the revenge story curdles a bit.

Still, Reiss and Tracy’s willingness to implicate Chef Slowik along with his vain, surface-obsessed plan gives MenuSome startling intrigue. Nicolas Cage is a pretentious chef who calls in PigSlowik created his own misery and torment. Menu doesn’t let him off the hook by playing out as a straightforward eat-the-rich morality tale. Although the humor is subtle, particularly in the humorously ironic course titles onscreen, it is a great comedy and horror-thriller. There’s some knuckle-biting tension as viewers wait to see how it’ll all play out, but Mylod and the writers also suggest that it’s worth chuckling a little at everyone involved, whether they’re serving up fancy versions of mayhem or just paying through the nose for it.

MenuThis film is currently in cinemas.