Film Now Do Chef John for the Sequel
If this decade is going to be known for anything in film history, it is going to be known for class conscious thriller movies which end with young women in bloodstained shirts, looking back at rich people in chaos. The Menu is the next in a line of such satirical movies as Ready or Not and Glass Onion, and Us, telling the story of the super wealthy getting up to rich people shit and paying the price for it.
I went into The Menu with one expectation: This is going to be a cannibal movie, right? The Menu shows twelve dinner guests going to a millionaire Island restaurant, to be served the meal of a lifetime by a sinister kitchen crew and a maniacally intense chef. What else could it be? I am glad to say it isn't a cannibal movie. It has far more surprises in store than that.
I can't say much about The Menu without spoiling its twists and turns, so I will avoid any further plot details. I will also spare you the tedious restaurant puns that a reviewer might be tempted to make.
The Menu works more on an allegorical level. Even though the film is grounded in a realistic setting, the events are too surreal for it to function as a conventional thriller. There is an obvious allegory about class strife, but there is also a theme about celebrity culture, and especially the celebrity around chefs. There's a lot of inspiration taken from Gordon Ramsey's: Kitchen Nightmares, with its dour chef superstar practically worshipped by line cooks and diners alike. Meanwhile, the extravagant compositions of meals puts you in mind of those huckster chefs who charge a thousand pounds for a gold leafed steak. Our point of view character, Margot, is the only one who is unimpressed by this religious devotion with cuisine, and is thus treated as a philistine and an intruder for the entire movie.
Even without cannibalism, there are plenty of implements in a kitchen that one could imagine being misused to dramatic effect in a film such as this, and yet The Menu is disciplined in that matter. It doesn't become outrageously gory, or go too far into trashy horror tropes, or turn into a complete farce. A lot is left offscreen to the imagination, which I think I prefer in this case.
The Menu is not an especially profound or thoughtful satire, but it is engaging and fun, and the joy comes in waiting, along with the dinner guests, for what is going to be served up next. Damn it.
Film Dark, twisted, funny, poignant, and satirical.
"Savor; do not eat" says chef Julian Slowik of the Hawthorne restaurant to his privileged wealthy guests. That could be well taken for the film itself, since it probably won't make sense without that.
Margot is the fairly uninterested surprise guest at Slowik's exclusive dinner, filling in for a date her companion had previously had going with him, and Margot isn't really there for the food as it is. She sees it as overwrought, pretentious, and overall unfulfilling, and as the official menu proceedings take place, the menu becomes more twisted and shocking until it becomes explicitly clear to Margot and the other diners that everyone's life is in danger.
For a film skewering wealth and pretension in a "trapped with the psychopath chef" story, there are several directions the film rather pointedly seems to avoid. It doesn't literalize "eat the rich". It also doesn't play as a Dwindling Party death game or slasher. Everyone is threatened, and death is spread out, but this is not a performance that kills the guests one by one. The tone also shifts between viewings. First watch, it's too unsettling and menacing to call a comedy, but later viewings feel too vindictively hilarious to call it horror. The whole-picture commentary turns the affair from psychological terror to deliciously extra petty revenge. There are brilliant bits of absurdity and snark, but the film works effectively to make genuine unease and tension, and the theatrics are so unhinged that it feels more artsy than parodic. Think of this as a much less gory, culinary Midsommar.
The cast works great. Margot could have been insufferably wry and pushed too hard to be "relatable", but Anya Taylor-Joy makes her the true no-bullshit heart of the film. Slowik is portrayed wonderfully by Ralph Fiennes, being menacing but not as cold or malicious as you would expect this villain to be. Hong Chau's Elsa, an impenetrably polite maƮtre d', may be the most menacing and compelling performance of the film. She's so uncanny and rote that you can mistake her for missing social cues when she's actually being very sarcastic.
I adore how this bonkers film resolves in psychology and the theme of the damage that working unappreciated can do, while indulging in a cathartic revenge fantasy through a service worker's eyes. The theme of the film is the nature of art and labor as service and the dysfunction when the rich fail to appreciate the passion of the workers they consume from, and service work is well uplifted by this film. The horror isn't that the chef is evil.
It's that, unlike the emulsion, he is broken.