The darkly funny horror film The Menu is a battle of wits set in absurd foodieism. This isn’t the kind of horror film with a lot of jump scares, although one sudden event shocks and disgusts the diners (though some think that it’s all part of the show). The Menu builds a sense of dread, a situation where it looks like survival is impossible.
Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) presides over a restaurant on its own island in the Pacific Northwest, with its own carefully curated gardens and aquaculture and a staff as cultish as The People’s Temple. The restaurant has 12 seats and each evening’s prix fixe goes for $1250.
Slowik seems like a self-important and officious kitchen tyrant, but unsettlingly high strung. That signals, and this is really not a significant spoiler, that he’s a balls out psycho intending to slaughter all his guests.
Creepily, it is revealed that tonight’s customers have been carefully selected by Slowik. The one exception is Margot (Ana Taylor-Joy), the last minute substitute date of Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) an obsequious celebrity chef groupie.
I’m a foodie myself; after all, I named my blog The Movie Gourmet. But, as much as I enjoy fine dining experiences and my own amateur cooking, I look askance on a $60 small plate of foam. The Menu is a wicked, The-Emperor-Has-No-Clothes sendup of that kind of culinary silliness. Each of the courses of Chef Slowik’s meal (and each wine pairing) is its own very funny comment on food fads. The best is the “breadless bread”, which I guess is not a “deconstructed” dish, but an “unconstructed” one. The Tyler character gets funnier as he ignores the escalating horrors to laser in on the avant-garde flavor combinations.
The key to the story is that Margot is immune to pretension. Margot never buys into the extreme food scene, and she has street smarts, which equip her for an epic psychological showdown with Slowik.
Ana Taylor-Joy is one of my very favorite actors, endlessly watchable with as she projects her unique blend of intelligence and danger, I first discovered her in Thoroughbreds, and have enjoyed her in The Queen’s Gambit, Last Night in Soho and even the blah Amsterdam.
Ralph Fiennes is really cast perfectly as an ego monster with a telling insecurity or two. Hoult is a hoot, and Hong Chau, is a master of deadpan as Slowik’s henchwoman.
The Menu is only the fourth feature for veteran television director Mark Mylod (Game of Thrones, Succession). The screenplay – and it;s a damn good one – is by Seth Weiss and Will Tracy, who come out of The Onion. These guys, with Ana Taylor-Joy and Ralph Fiennes, have made a pointedly acid and entertaining movie.