"The Menu": review

"Margot" (Anya Taylor-Joy) talks to Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) as Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) looks on.

[WARNING: spoilers. That word takes on a special meaning for a film like this.]

"The Menu" is a wonderfully tangled ball of reused tropes from multiple genres. Whether this makes the movie derivative or clever is a matter of discussion. A 2022 dark comedy directed by Mark Mylod, the film stars Ralph Fiennes, Hong Chau, Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicholas Hoult, Janet McTeer, Reed Birney, Judith Light, Aimee Carrero, Paul Adelstein, Rob Yang, Arturo Castro, Mark St. Cyr, and John Leguizamo. The basic premise is that a bunch of rich, privileged people take a boat to an exclusive dinner on a coastal island, Hawthorn, owned by business tycoon and angel investor Doug Verrick* and run by Chef Julian Slowik (Fiennes). The dinner turns out not to be what anyone might expect, and the guests who received an invitation to the island had all been invited for specific reasons. 

Of the people who have been invited to attend this special dinner, only one stands out: Margot (Taylor-Joy), who was a last-minute replacement for Tyler Ledford (Hoult). Tyler had planned to take his girlfriend with him to the island, but they broke up, so he hired Margot, an escort, to go with him. Margot's tastes trend more toward normal things like fast food; Tyler, meanwhile, fancies himself an educated foodie who has a refined appreciation for haute cuisine. As the dinner progresses, it becomes obvious that Margot and Tyler inhabit totally different worlds; it's a bit like inviting someone who loves death metal to sit through Beethoven. Margot is not at all comfortable in this milieu.

Also at the party is has-been actor George Diaz (Leguizamo) and his pretty assistant Felicity (Carrero), who is trying to leave the actor and her current job. Food critic Lillian Bloom (McTeer) is in attendance with her sycophantic editor Ted (Adelstein); three young employees of Verrick—Bryce, Soren, and Dave (Yang, Castro, St. Cyr)—are there as well. Richard and Anne (Birney and Light), an older couple who have been to this restaurant many times, elect not to take the guest tour but go straight to the restaurant instead. When everyone initially arrives at the island by boat, they are greeted by the strict and humorless maître d', Elsa (Chau). The group very quickly learns that the evening is to be precisely scripted, but they still have no idea what they are in for.

The story starts off as a frou-frou, pinky-twiddling comedy about highbrow and lowbrow manners, but as the courses go on, we move from comedy to horror-comedy as circumstances become progressively more absurd and frightening. "It's all part of the menu; please take your seats," we are repeatedly assured as gunshots ring out, blood spatters, fingers are amputated, and the truth of the evening is revealed. Margot, it turns out, is the monkey wrench in the works for what was supposed to be a smoothly executed plan crafted in part by the head chef. And her name isn't even really Margot.

From here on, we've got spoilers, so abandon ship now if you don't want to know what's really going on. The menu for the evening, crafted mostly by Chef Slowik, is essentially one long, culinary act of revenge against the people who have been invited. Food critic Lillian has ruined careers with her often-scathing reviews. George Diaz starred in a dud of a film that Chef Slowik wasted a rare free day watching, and the awfulness of the film still haunts him. (While Diaz has a right to have the occasional dud of a film, he also turns out to be quite a shit in his regular life, too.) Richard and Anne, the older couple, have visited Hawthorn eleven times, but they are too superficial to remember even one of Chef Slowik's many dishes, all of which were painstakingly introduced before being served. Even worse, it turns out that Richard once took advantage of Margot's escort services. The young employees of angel investor Doug Verrick have been skimming profits from the company. Tyler, who seemed like a point-of-view character at the beginning of the film, is accused of being a fake—someone who knows about cooking techniques while knowing nothing about how to cook. All of these people are avaricious, superficial, and generally selfish, and their collective actions have sucked all the joy and meaning out of Chef Slowik's life, so Slowik means for all these people to die along with the chef himself and his staff. Margot, though, was never part of Chef Slowik's plan, so a lot of the film is devoted to answering the question of whether she needs to die alongside everyone else. At one point, Chef Slowik gives Margot a choice: die with the takers—i.e., the rich assholes—or die with the givers—i.e., the service-industry people. That doesn't seem like much of a choice from Margot's point of view, and as it turns out, the choice isn't quite that simple.

Critics have called "The Menu" a horror-comedy because of its mixture of highbrow/lowbrow hilarity, startling moments of gore, and tense tableaux, especially in the scenes between Margot and Chef Slowik. The movie also calls to mind a pile of other references. We'll start with one of the most obvious tropes: inviting a bunch of bad people so that they all get their just desserts (and a just dessert is literally how the movie ends**). We've seen this at least as far back as Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which a group of garbage kids (excepting Charlie) receives its comeuppance from the factory's owner Willy Wonka. This also calls to mind the recent film "Glass Onion," which also involves a group of guests invited to an island, all of whom have some unpleasant connection with the host, as well as one guest who isn't supposed to be there. "The Menu" contains the final-girl trope seen in so many horror movies, although in this case, the monster (Chef Slowik) lets the final girl go. The way in which the rest of the diners are all killed brought to mind "Midsommar," in which people are burned alive. At the end of "The Menu," the guests are fitted with poncho-like garments covered in marshmallows; graham crackers are sprinkled all around them, and fez-like hats of chocolate are placed on their heads as Chef Slowik announces that the dessert course is s'mores, which he humorously calls "the most offensive assault on the human palate ever contrived." However, with the addition of fire, s'mores become something glorious, and fire purifies. Margot, who demanded a cheeseburger after multiple courses of overthought, meaningless food, is permitted to have her burger "to go," and with that, she leaves before the dessert course is readied. Finding a boat, she starts it up and powers to the mainland, but the boat runs out of gas before she gets there. Margot watches from a distance as the Hawthorn compound explodes, taking everyone on the island with it. She takes a healthy bite of her extremely well-made burger, and... roll credits.

"The Menu" can be seen as a satire about the pretentious side of the food-service industry. Chef Slowik's character represents all the people who get into haute cuisine and fall out of love with it, especially as they have to deal with shallow people who are never satisfied. The food served in the movie was designed by superchef Dominique Crenn—a French chef who moved to the States, where she runs Atelier Crenn as the only female chef in America with three Michelin stars. The movie has several title-card moments that are meant to evoke "Chef's Table"; anyone who has seen that series will recognize the pretentious style, with floaty, Spartan letters fading in and describing the dish in front of the viewer. At one point, Tyler the superficial foodie is forced to cook a meal in front of Chef Slowik; when he proves unable to cook properly, he stands there, humiliated, as Slowik whispers something inaudible in his ear. Whatever the chef said, Tyler is destroyed by it: he goes into a side room and hangs himself. What's interesting is that, in that moment, I didn't see much of a difference between Tyler and Lillian the food critic. Meanwhile, a title card refers to Tyler's food as "Tyler's Bullshit."

I did end up with questions about why some of the people deserved to die. Anne, for example, might have been as guilty as her husband about not remembering any of Slowik's previous dishes, but she struck me as more of a victim than anything else: she had to deal with the humiliation of knowing her husband had been with a call girl, and at the very end, as Margot is being permitted to leave, Anne compassionately makes a subtle shooing motion to Margot: get out while you can, girl. I didn't think Anne deserved to die. The same goes for the rest of the island compound's staff: the various cooks in the open kitchen, the sommelier, the wait staff, etc. But apparently, they were all okay with participating in this suicide pact, knowing from the beginning that the day would end with their deaths.

As for the people who did deserve to die (according to the film's morality, I mean), one has to wonder—as is actually mentioned in the film—why these people didn't do more to resist once they realized the nature of what was going on. They probably could have overpowered the staff, but they mostly sat there like sheep waiting to be slaughtered. A few of the dinner guests did, in fact, try to escape, but the attempts all seemed halfhearted, and they all ended in failure. Everyone else struck me as hypnotized by the unreality of the situation—and by the time we've reached the dessert course, when everyone was being fitted with marshmallow ponchos and chocolate hats, the group was totally passive, waiting to die. That final scene, and several others before it, mightily strained my suspension of disbelief.

Toward the end of the film, as Margot is about to demand her cheeseburger, she yells at Chef Slowik that his cooking has no love and isn't filling. The dishes are all abstractions, "intellectual exercises," as one character puts it. It's only when Slowik lovingly makes Margot her cheeseburger that we see any real humanity in the man. Food-designer Dominique Crenn said it was a challenge for her to create food that was supposed to look both beautiful and dead, a representation of the passionlessness that had overtaken Chef Slowik's soul.

For me as well, the movie felt well put-together but somewhat cold and passionless, too. Most of the characters are intentionally unlikeable, but even Margot evoked very little warmth. From the start, she was at a sneering remove from the proceedings. I probably felt the most sympathy for Chef Slowik, whose sadness and anger drive the plot. But even Slowik is a puzzle: one of the courses is titled "Man's Folly," and it involves a female chef whom Slowik had sexually assaulted multiple times but retained on his staff. After the incidents, the female chef announces to the group, Slowik never gave her any eye contact or any other recognition at all. The "Man's Folly" reaches its crescendo with the female chef driving a small pair of scissors into Chef Slowik's thigh as he stands there stoically and takes the punishment. So I have to ask: if Slowik assaulted this woman multiple times, why on earth did she remain at Hawthorn and not run away screaming bloody murder? Further, why did she then accede to the suicide pact that was Slowik's revenge on his guests? (She even suggested that the revenge should end with everyone dying.) I'm still shaking my head about that character.

So "The Menu" has problems, but it also has its good points: it's genuinely funny on occasion (the "Chef's Table" vibe, especially when it contrasts with the mounting horror, is hilarious—and in fact, people from the "Chef's Table" series worked on this satire, including creator David Gelb, so they were good sports about the whole thing), and the horror is definitely horrible. Margot doesn't turn out to be a superpowered über-heroine: she's allowed to leave the island by the island's resident monster. The tense/tender scenes between Margot and Slowik are, for my money, the best parts of the movie; as we ultimately see, Slowik doesn't want Margot to die because she was never an object of his anger. Even more, Slowik appreciates Margot's reaction to his cheeseburger at the end, and even if only for a moment, he rediscovers a love of cooking. The actors all do excellent work in their roles, with a special thumbs-up for Ralph Fiennes, Hong Chau, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Nicholas Hoult (another Brit playing an American—why, Hollywood, why can't you find Americans to play Americans?). So if you're in the mood for a good-but-flawed black comedy that seems to be saying that rich people are soulless assholes, that we ought to respect our service industry more than we do, and that we should live life passionately and deeply, then "The Menu" might be for you. You might also appreciate the movie more if you're a foodie.

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*I tried multiple references—Google, IMDb, Wikipedia, TVTropes.com—to look up which actor played Doug Verrick, but I was unable to find a name. Weird.

**The linguistically astute will realize that the dessert pun works mostly at the phonetic level. At the semantic level, the word desserts in "just desserts" refers to a punishment that is justly (de)served. So there's dessert—the post-dinner confection—and dessert—the fitting punishment (which is conceptually and etymologically related to the concept of deserves).