Tear Jerker / The Menu

• Slowik in tears while cooking a simple cheeseburger. After an entire career of dealing with pretentious asshole foodies, his final dish is something he loves for someone who just wants a well-cooked meal.
• Related to Katherine's reveal that she was sexually harassed by Julian. It's implied that what led Julian to proposition her twice was out of loneliness after the loss of his family, as well as having a passing resemblance to his wife. Whether that loss was from divorce or their deaths is left up in the air. But either way, the photos in his personal office depict a man who started his career happy and ended it utterly miserable.
  • The last photo really does drive the point home, with Julian in the arm of his cheery-looking financier... while Julian himself is grimacing; this is not the look you'd expect from someone with enough prestige to get their own private island restaurant.
• Before leaving, Margot turns and looks at the diners one last time. Clearly wanting to do...something to help these people she knows are about to die, who also know they're about to die too. But everyone looks dejected, resigned to their fate, accepting that they're going to die and there's nothing they can do, nothing she can do even though she's leaving. And, her eyes meet Anne, who can tell what she's thinking, and despite having every reason to hate her, she wordlessly encourages Margot to save herself. With a heartbreaking expression Anne sorrowfully nods her head and silently gestures for her to go. Margot, after seeing this, turns and walks away in tears. She knows that she's outnumbered and unarmed and the only thing she can do is leave while she can, but it still hurts knowing she can't do anything to save anyone else.
• Everyone else's death during the final course—staff and guests alike. All because of Slowik's own dissatisfaction with his life and career, and his ego preventing him from finding something better and happier. In the end, they were all human beings who died needlessly painful (though relatively quick) deaths.
• Julian points out that none of his guests made much of an attempt to fight back against him once the violence began. By this point, though, it's clear that the staff outnumber the guests by nearly three to one, have plenty of knives/cleavers at their disposal, can easily run down any would-be escapees, and will fanatically follow whatever order Julian gives them. A sadder reason for the guests' complaisance is that despite their wealth and power in the world, all of them are slaves to the same social script that ruined Julian's life. No matter what horrors they're forced to witness throughout the meal, the calm insistence of the staff is always enough to make them sit still and keep enduring the ordeal. All of them are pompous aristocrats who would never kick up a fuss in a fancy restaurant, even if the restaurant is literally killing them. As if to illustrate this, the guests pull out their credit cards to 'pay' for the meal (and the experience of being tortured) even as they know they're all about to die.
• A deleted scene from the beginning of the film casts Julian Slowik's revenge in a much more depressing light. Lillian Bloom is bragging on the ferry ride about how she found Slowik after three years in exile working at a humble Korean taco truck, working on the grill, and demanded an interview. This suggests that revenge was not his first solution, but his last; he tried to escape the limelight and return to what made him happy, but was dragged right back in. The other guests unknowingly lampshade this, saying that none of this would have happened without Bloom.
  • That said, another deleted scene from later on has Margot suggest that Julian was aching to get back into the limelight, pointing out that someone who legitimately didn't want to be found wouldn't have been running a food truck a block away from a kitschy food festival. He acknowledges that she may be right. It's possible that he subconsciously considered this outcome inevitable, and simply allowed it to happen.

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