The Menu is a darkly comedic thriller from director, Mark Mylod, and writers, Will Tracy and Seth Reiss. It follows a young couple Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) and Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) who travel with a group of various wealthy guests to a remote island where they are all about to enjoy an experience at Hawthorne, a highly exclusive restaurant led by a noteworthy celebrity chef, Julian Slowik (Ralph Finnes). The food is as fancy as it gets, presented in a way that is very conceptual and methodical, but as the night goes on, the nature of the night’s engagement turns out to be far more sinister than anyone expected.
The guests are largely made up of every stereotype of the 1% that you can imagine, you got the movie star (John Leguizamo) and his ambitious and privaleged assistant (Aimee Carrero), a group of tech bros (Rob Yang, Arturo Castro, Mark St. Cyr), whose boss helped finance the restaurant, a highfalutin food critic (Janet McTeer) and her publisher (Paul Adelstein), who is simply incapable of having an opinion of his own. There are other characters, but they are there as a secret connection to Margot that will drive some of the drama up even further (though, not by a lot in retrospect).
Things start off OK, if insufferably pretentious, as Julian introduces the courses, each more complex and intricate than the last. Margot is the only one who doesn’t seem to be into the experience while Tyler is practically in heaven. However, things begin to get suspicious when tortillas with scandalous images from each guests’ past is toasted onto the surface. There is more going on than it seems, which get some people nervous. And then another course begins with one of the line cooks shoots himself in the mouth right before his creation is given out to the shocked and horrified guests.
There is an attempt at social satire here, ridiculing the very nature of these kinds of fancy restaurants, their approach to food, and the kind of people who would enjoy that, but there is also a class element. Margot is the only one who doesn’t have much to her name, and her attitude contrasts with rest of the people involved, and we also observe how entitled, self-obsessed, arrogant, and in some cases, straight up criminal they are as well. However, the film doesn’t let Julien off the hook either, portraying him as this Jim Jones-esque figure going on a full on descent into something dark and self-destructive.
The film is quite amusing at times, with certain moments that are genuinely hilarious, but it’s not very consistent. Most of the time, it has that thing where it has the vibe of something funny going on, but without actually putting in the jokes. But I could look over that if the satire itself was more concise and biting (pun intended). Thematically, the whole “eat the rich” attitude gets muddled by various plot elements that are introduced to us as the film goes on, and while the attempt at something more complex is appreciated, it made it hard to really parse out what the film is trying to say. And the few things it does end up saying is fairly rudimentary.
The performances are what kept me invested, particularly from the main three players. Finnes is fantastic, managing to balance a persona that is humorous, terrifying, and unpredictable all at once. Taylor-Joy offers solid grounding for everything going on, considering how comical and two-dimensional most of the other people are, and it’s hard not to root for the only seemingly normal and everyday person in the film, perhaps the only time you can say that about Anya Taylor-Joy. Hoult doesn’t have much to his character, but he brings so much as a performer, especially comedically, that it works wonders. I also want to give a shout out to Hong Chau, who plays Julien’s soft-spoken but intimidating sous chef.
There’s definitely things to enjoy about The Menu, but ultimately, it’s just OK, it’s fine, it’s passable, but not something I’ll be thinking about in a week or so. It’s just not funny enough, not sharp enough, not clever enough, not scary enough, not mean enough to make any of its ambitions land. The storytelling is too allegorical to take in as a straightforward narrative, yet too literal to absorb it as pure allegory. The balance just isn’t there, it’s very one-note. I didn’t have a bad time watching it, but I was constantly thinking to myself, “this should be hitting way more harder than it is.” Despite the fact the whole premise seems to have a foundation of exploring class divide, some of the more interesting stuff in the film would have worked as a character study of a famous chef gone mad with the class stuff as subtext. I don’t know, I can’t say what could have made this work better, all I know is that the film doesn’t really deliver on its otherwise compelling setup, and some pot elements raise too many questions, and not the kind I think the filmmakers intended on you to dwell upon as you exit the theater. It’s an admirable and well made film, but like the food presented, it’s ultimately hollow.
The Menu opens in theaters on November 18th.