No, I still haven’t watched The Bear yet. Does anyone ever feel like adult life is a litany of usernames and passwords, loading and unloading the dishwasher, and explaining to different people which of their favorite shows you haven’t seen yet and why? Yes, I know it’s great and that it also might give me PTSD flashbacks of my worst times in the weeds from my line cook days. For the record, I also haven’t seen HOTD (the Game of Thrones acronym that sounds like New York’s hottest club) or Rings of Power. The latter I refuse to watch on principle after having some of my fondest childhood memories of my beloved, untouchable Lord of the Rings violently sharted on for 9 hours by the bumbling and bloated Hobbit trilogy no one asked for. Thanks Obama, er Peter Jackson. A piece of food media I did make time to consume recently was The Menu, a delightfully bizarre film that left me craving more movies like this.
The best way I can describe The Menu if you haven’t seen it is that it’s Midsommar meets Pig with a dash of Saw and Ratatouille to balance everything out. Since Pig already felt like the unexpected offspring of Chefs Table and John Wick, I hope you can already get a sense that The Menu is juggling a lot of disparate influences and reference points. So the first and most impressive thing for me was the end result doesn’t feel tonally dissonant. Just as The White Lotus masterfully juggles deeply funny scenes and with drama, suspense, and dark satire, so too does The Menu deftly keep several knives in the air at once in an impressive display of extreme genre juggling. Director Mark Mylod (of Sucession fame) clearly knows what he’s doing.
The premise of the film is that a group of people are headed to the fine dining experience of their lives. As they board a boat to attend a $1250 per head exclusive tasting menu on a private island, Anya Taylor Joy’s character Margot remarks “are we going to eat a Rolex?”
We know from the jump that something isn’t quite right, and there a lot of the same type of eerie breadcrumbs laid out in broad daylight that you see in the first half of Midsommar. As we get to know the other diners, there’s a some truly great character acting that adds believability and fully brings us into this world. Keenly observed satirical screenwriting scaffolds this film and will make White Lotus fans feel right at home. At their core, all of the diners are deeply flawed, frustrating, and problematic archetypes of rich people. Kicking off an upperclass twit of the year lineup that would give Monty Python a run for their money, we have Jon Leguizamo as a washed-up movie star who’s there with his assistant who he may or may not be fucking and/or in business with (we later learn it’s both). There’s an obnoxious and condescending food critic and her boot-licking editor. Battling it out for the role of least likable man on the island are three finance bros who have their insufferability turned up to 11 or whatever Elon Musk’s setting is these days. Perhaps most unlikable of all is Margot’s date Tyler, a selfish and self-professed foodie, whose cardinal sin is taking photos of the food even after the restaurant explicitly forbids it, and generally being a total dick to Margot all night.
The evening and the film are both structured around the various courses that the chef Julian Slowik, played masterfully by Ralph Fiennes, has put together for them. At first, they’re indistinguishable from the carefully plated haute cuisine we’ve seen dozens of times on Chefs Table. The culinary verisimilitude is honestly jaw-dropping. You have to tip your hat to the cinematographer and chef Dominique Crenn, who they hired as culinary consultant, for how perfectly observed their fake fine dining dishes are. In this way, the first half of this film reminds me of the first half of “Jack Sparrow,” where The Lonely Island actually writes a convincing pop club banger that you find yourself bobbing your head to before Michael Bolton hilariously derails everything in the chorus.
As the courses progress and get more elaborate, the enigmatic genius chef begins to show his hand and mess with the guests heads a bit and then, quite suddenly, things take a sinister turn. As a plain white tarp is laid out in a move reminiscent of a similarly shocking scene from American Psycho, the chef introduces a course called “The Mess,” and we reach the point of no return for this dinner, evening, and film. In a horrific moment that straddles the line between performance art and restaurant culture gone wrong, things get quickly, unexpectedly bloody. The setting that moments before felt luxurious, prestigious, and beautiful is suddenly claustrophic, menacing, and horrific. The dining room becomes a prison cell, the kitchen a torture chamber, the cooks captors armed with knives. The exclusive island the guests dreamed of getting to visit is now somewhere they worry they’ll never leave alive. Chef Slowik minces garlic not words and quickly makes it clear it’s his plan for ever single person there to die, including him.
At the core of the tension of this film s how the screenwriters observe and then distort the various power dynamics at play at a fancy meal. On the surface we experience how it’s the diners who have a lot of power via their money and influence. It’s quite literally their ticket to this exclusive island dinner. This is most blatant in the characters of the three finance bros and the food critic and her editor. Their financial power and connections could make this restaurant sink or swim, something they openly flaunt at times. Yet while the chef and his obedient sous chefs are just there to serve the guests, they also have the power of the restaurants prestige and exclusivity. Eating out is itself an act of submission, when we give up a lot of time, money, and control for someone else to choose what we put into our bodies, when, and even how. The Menu carefully observes and replicates this dynamic at first and then pushes the tension at its core to its extreme by asking us: what if the restaurant was there not to entertain or coddle the guests, but to ridicule and punish them? What if the chef used his command of salt, heat, umami, and knives to compose a painstakingly articulate and fatal “fuck you!” It’s this sort of elaborate tasting menu of revenge that ends up being the tense, dramatic fuel of The Menu.
Once the tables are turned on the guests, they’re thrust into a Lord of the Flies situation where their money and networks are useless and they feel just as defenseless as the lamb and beef in the restaurants walk-in refrigerator. In this way, the films title is a clever inversion. The guests arrive thinking they will get to enjoy the menu, only to realize that they are part of the menu. The consumers become the consumed.
One of the big themes of the second and third acts is that rich people are so used to getting their way that when the shit hits the fan they don’t even remember how to fight back anymore. They’re too coddled to know how to survive. A life of decadence and luxury makes you soft, impotent, and defenseless. For once, fancy food poses bigger, faster threats than gout or heart disease, which makes the privileged guests lose their minds.
The Menu is so fun on one level just because the premise is fresh, and original. We’ve never seen a mainstream horror movie set in a fine dining restaurant before and it’s energizing to see a setting associated with wealth, status, and indulgence become inverted and then devolve into madness, revenge, and violence. In a genre saturated with spinoffs of The Conjuring that’s rapidly devolving into self-parody with the amount of obvious jump scares, The Menu sails somewhere new and genuinely creative.
It’s also satisfying because it proudly, unapologetically refuses to be just one genre. While it has moments of horrific violence, they are remarkably sparing for a movie that was marketed as a horror movie. Moreover, it doesn’t rely on suspense or jump scares to keep you engaged and was much less stressful to watch than Midsommar, The Babadook, or even Parasite. You’re also not really worried how anyone will make it off of the island because the film has done such a good job of getting you to dislike most of the protagonists, except for Anya Taylor Joy’s character of Margot.
While it has moments of dark comedy and biting satire, it doesn’t have much interest in making you laugh for very long, and deftly transitions from a comedy beat to a horror beat and back again. This slippery tone may bother some viewers who expected either a scary thrill ride or a heavy-handed Adam McKay style satire of restaurants (though I’ll note he did produce this, alongside Will Ferrell). However, at its best The Menu’s genre fluidity allows it to escape the confines of both horror and comedy and do something else entirely. It’s a defiant and challenging film that is almost a genre unto itself.
Just like the hyperbolic meal it seeks to satirize, this film is a wild and immersive ride from start to finish. This begins with the physical setting, which is brought vividly to life with excellent cinematography that grounds us in the reverential beauty of the immaculate restaurant and the surrounding island. During the meal, the camerawork carefully and cleverly borrows from the indulgent slow-mo plating shots and hyper close ups of Chefs Table. They even got David Gelb, that shows creator, to serve as their second unit director. The result are scenes that are lavish and jaw-dropping, that coupled with the great character acting, truly place you in the dining room soaking up all of the details.
If you are a food nerd like me, there’s a lot to respect about The Menu, even if aren’t into horror movies. For those of us that follow restaurants and chefs the way some people follow football, there’s a ton of juicy tidbits to mop up in The Menu. The unnamed island the film is set on is clearly heavily influenced by Blaine Wetzels’s famous (and now disgraced) Willows In on Lummi Island. The hyper locavore approach borrows heavily from Magnus Nilson’s Faviken and Rene Redzepi's NOMA among others. Yet these heavyweights from Chefs Table have dishes inspired by nostalgic childhood memories, The Menu has a taco course based on alcoholism and domestic violence. There’s another, even darker course that brings a dose of #MeToo to the evening and makes a razor sharp critique of sexual assault in the service industry.
Yet The Menu doesn’t really seem interested in having one crystallized message. Yes, there are are clear “eat the rich” vibes and it successfully and repeatedly sends up the entitlement, self-involvement, and naiveté of the 1%. Yet what’s lacking is the meticulous and multi-layered class allegory that we see in a film like Parasite, or the taut thrill ride lined with razor sharp social commentary that we saw in Get Out. The restaurant and the chef aren’t really a symbol for anything and the dinner isn’t really a metaphor for social collapse. Not that we need everything to have a 1:1 symbolism or correspondence. Part of the intellectual power of Jordan Peele’s Us for me was the sprawling, messy, challenging nature of the world it confronted you with. Good horror invites us to simultaneously dwell in the literal and the allegorical. A good horror narrative should work on both levels, with the story as presented taking us somewhere worth going, while the weight of the themes hitting home hard enough to deliver the film version of a long finish in wine.
The closest thing it has to a message isn’t a message at all, but a question: who is the real villain? Is it chef Slowik? His entitled asshole diners? His minions who blindly follow him in hopes of becoming him? Or is it the restaurant industry that stamped out the relaxed, universal joy of food and replaced it with these pretentious and nose-bleedingly expensive tasting menus only available to the super rich? Was it capitalism all along?
The Menu is most effective not as an elaborate allegory like Parasite nor as a social thriller like Get Out, but as an immersive, dark satire that critiques the world of fine dining. It’s no surprise to learn then that both of the screenwriters, Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, spent time working at The Onion. The power of this movie is its ability to keenly observe and then carefully subvert the subject matter.
This starts with the visuals. The filmmakers worked closely with Dominique Crenn to consult on the food in the film, and her attention to detail when it comes to the plating and poetic concepts behind the dishes really shines through. When we see micro nasturtium greens and sea beans carefully tweezered onto a plate next to spheres and dots of sauce and a confetti of artisanal micro-greens, it’s so elegant and accurate to how fancy food looks that we almost forget we’re watching a horror movie, if only for a moment. This effect is quite intentional, since a huge amount of the text and subtext of this film is how our frothing mania around the beauty and prestige of fancy dinners prevents us from seeing the deeper, darker cost of it all. When we first see the dozens of aproned chefs, hunched in the frantic agony of plating, faces scrunched with concentration as they sear proteins and tweezer garnishes into plate we, like the guests, admire it as dedication to their craft. While the other guests are lured in by the luxury and decadence, only Taylor Joy’s character of Margot is skeptical. As the only sympathetic point of view character, we begin to adopt her doubts as our own, with the editing and cinematography guiding us on. As the meal stretches on, the kitchen brigade’s militaristic precision and cult-like chants of “Yes, chef” start to drift from normal to uncanny until the whole affair is downright menacing. This is a film where something as simple as a clap ends up having tremendous weight.
It’s a hard hitting deconstruction of the absurdity of fine dining in a dark and macabre way. As such, it’s most enjoyable if viewed not as a horror movie or a comedy, but a satire of fine dining that uses horror and comedy tropes to deliver its message. The blood, jokes, tension, and release are layered into the final product with the same care that Julian Slowik uses with salt, fat, acid, crunch, and colors in one of his Jackson Pollock-esque appetizers.
What won me over about The Menu was that after some truly dark and bleak scenes including the most stressful chopping of leeks I’ve ever had to witness, the emotional and moral climax of the film centers around the making of a cheeseburger. In this regard this film borrows most heavily from the climax of Ratatouille of all movies. As a quick culinary aside, I think it’s noteworthy that this film and Pig, both dark, nihilistic investigations of the madness and obsession inherent in the world of fine dining, crescendo with a what I’ll dub a “Ratatouille reveal”: a humble dish conjured up under desperate circumstances that manages to convince or win over an unsympathetic antagonist through the power of nostalgia. It’s a clever shorthand for the power of food to tug at our emotions and play with our memories. It also addresses the films central moral question about the perils of consuming soulless, loveless art as a status symbol in an elegant and touching way.
When things finally come to a flaming end in a way that apes Midsommar’s ending using a series of visuals that also perfectly replicates a Grant Achatz dessert from Alinea, you just have to tip your hat to the giddy madness of it all. It’s gratuitously elaborate, playful, and nauseatingly beautiful, like someone let MC Escher make board games or had Frank Gehry design bouncy castles.
The Menu is fresh and fun and fuck you to the world of fine dining that’s as salty as it is savory. It’s a film that will leave you thinking about it for a long time afterwards, something that for me is one of the biggest compliments you can give a movie. I don’t know what this says about me, but after a surreal and harrowing 107 minute run time, I was ready to keep going. Like the meal it critiques, it leaves you stimulated and satisfied, but deeply hungry for more. Or maybe what you really want is a cheeseburger…