‘The Menu’ Aims to Repel, And You’ll Love It.
By Celia Sampaio
Anxiety, satisfaction, shock, disgust, understanding. Prepare to feel all these and more during “The Menu,” a movie that makes a scathing commentary on the elite through endless brutality and violence. Whether that violence is warranted or not is up to you.
“The Menu” is a lively new film from Mark Mylod filled with an uneasiness you’ll find yourself simultaneously appalled by but also wanting more.
And man, did the people want more.
This 2022 film made a surprisingly sufficient profit, with nearly $80 million in box office sales during this current era of fleeting moviegoers. The film’s main cast consists of some long-adored Hollywood favorites, Ralph Fiennes (“Schindler’s List,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel”) and John Leguizamo (“Chef,” “Ice Age”). They starred alongside some more recent fan favorites, Anya Taylor-Joy (“The Queen’s Gambit,” “The Witch”) and Nicholas Hoult (“Warm Bodies,” “Skins”).
“The Menu” follows five dining parties throughout the course of an evening at the astonishingly elite Hawthorn. The gaudy restaurant is appropriately named after the secluded island it resides on, where diners can only arrive via a small boat that leaves as soon as they disembark.
Ah yes, nothing could possibly go wrong there.
“The Menu” opens with an unshakable ominous feeling and an ambiguous overview of the characters. While the film reveals the sordid qualities of each dining party, they form into different versions of the same shallow people; snobby businessmen who eat expensively for the sake of feeling luxurious, narcissistic celebrities who dine for their own self-centered career growth, food critics who turn their cheek to how their crass reviews devastate and nauseatingly wealthy couples who dine at places like Hawthorn out of boredom.
The film more closely follows the one couple unlike any of the others. Tyler (Hoult), a true foodie, who dines at Hawthorn for his intense “love” of high-class food, though it is better described as an obsession. Margot (Taylor-Joy), Tyler’s date there by circumstance, who deeply loathes this level of superficial, upscale dining best served at Hawthorn. The dinner commences, and so does the unforgettable experience that will change the diner’s lives forever. And very permanently.
The courses are served, each course acting as a new chapter in the film, and with each one, the atmosphere gets darker and more gruesome. The dishes start out normal — obnoxious and posh, but normal.
Then the food slowly gets more outlandish, quickly becoming an obvious mockery of shallow fine dining and the people there to partake in it. Take for instance the dish titled “Breadless Bread Plate,” a plate dressed with minuscule dollops of sauce accompanied by — you guessed it, no bread. In a sharp turn, the film transitions from slightly sour to a deep dive into utter panic, gore and awe. And it doesn’t let up even for a single breath.
Although the film at its surface parades as a thrilling horror, the perfectly balanced comedic satire hidden throughout the 106 minutes keeps you just frightened enough, but still allows you to enjoy a genuine laugh before cramming more gore down your throat. Alongside this humor, “The Menu” does a clever job of granting an inkling of hope, ripping it away, and somehow making you susceptible enough to do it all again.
“The Menu” may be no Oscar nominee, but at its simplest remains an entertaining watch with a unique concept and an undeniably talented cast. Through its optics, “The Menu” works to disassemble the absurdist culture behind “fine” dining by floating over the shallow extravagance and going straight to the point of unabashed outrageousness.
In other words, it makes fun of rich people and their laughably lavish hobbies. Who can’t enjoy that?
4 out of 5 stars.
“The Menu” is available on HBO Max with a subscription.
