The Menu.

The Menu is a dark comedy/horror/social satire with an incredible cast and an impressive commitment to the details around its premise. It takes a hard turn about a third of the way through the movie that starts to make the audacious twist clear, and stays true to its theme almost to the end, where the movie sticks its first landing but fails to do so on the second, ultimate conclusion, which might be the difference between this film being just very good and being my favorite of the year. It’s streaming on HBO Max and is available for rent on amazon, iTunes, etc.

The film opens as we see a handful of obnoxious rich people boarding a boat for a highly exclusive restaurant, The Hawthorn, which is on a private island and helmed by a famous chef, Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), with a prix-fixe menu that costs $1250 a person. Our primary perspective is through the ardent foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) and his date, Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), who we quickly learn was not the woman he was originally taking to this dinner. Other guests include the has-been actor George (John Leguizamo), an insufferable food critic who helped make Slowik’s career but is clearly now a skeptic (Janet McTeer), a trio of tech bros, and an older couple (Reed Birney and Judith Light) who we later learn are regulars. Margot recognizes the husband right away and isn’t happy to see him, nor he her. The diner-toursts are met at the dock by Elsa (Hong Chau), a humorless automaton, who gives them a brief tour of some of the grounds around the hotel before their seating. The meal begins with the sort of food you’d expect at a restaurant like this, with foams and gels and molecular gastronomy and deconstructions, with Slowik introducing each course with a soliloquy, only to have those become darker each time around. By the fourth course, things have taken a turn for the macabre, and it’s clear that this is no ordinary night at the Hawthorn. (There’s a great deleted scene that gives a little more backstory and that I think would have even further immersed the viewers in the food criticism aspect of the film, although I understand why it might have been cut.)

There is a lot going on here, and most of it works extremely well, starting with the film’s disdain for modern foodie culture – not food culture, mind you, but foodie culture, the worship of chefs, the conspicuous consumption, and the snobbery towards those who don’t speak the vernacular or share in the adulation. There’s a clear demarcation here between those two ideas; the substantive parts of Slowik’s monologues involve a real appreciation for food, for where it comes from, for living creatures that died for our plates, for the environment and the ecologies we spoil so we can eat whatever we want, whenever we want it. Chef Dominique Crenn, of Atelier Crenn, recreated several of her restaurant’s dishes for the film, and the plates we do see look incredible – and realistic, at least for a restaurant of this caliber. It’s food designed for the diner to appreciate the food, both the ingredients and the skill required to prepare them. That is separate from the diners, who are largely here for what you might call the “wrong” reasons, such as for the ability to say they ate there, even if they don’t remember or appreciate what they ate.

Margot turns out to be significant in the plot, as she’s the unexpected guest – the one person who wasn’t on the original manifest, and her mere presence seems to throw Slowik and some of the staff off their games, where they are otherwise robotic in their cultlike devotion to the chef and his commands. The contrast between their reactions to her and their reactions to everyone else is one of the early markers that something is very wrong at the Hawthorn, although I don’t think it remotely telegraphs what’s to come. (I will spoil one thing here, because it bothered me that it might be the twist: There’s no cannibalism involved. That’s such an overdone gag at this point that I was going to be seriously pissed off if that was the answer. It’s not.)

After a series of shocking events that drive the story deeper into the abyss, we get a double-barreled ending, one of which works extremely well, the other of which seems overcooked. The Menu requires some suspension of disbelief; it is the triple-distilled version of reality, which is a hallmark of great satire. The script is sending up both sides of the blade here, both the chef and the patrons, and does so effectively for most of the film, working with slight exaggerations that push the characters just to the wrong side of the line of plausibility. It earns that modest suspension of disbelief with dishes that look and sound completely accurate to the setting, with customers who viewers will easily recognize as archetypes, with a chef who conforms to the stereotype of the kitchen tyrant who abuses his staff in the name of great food. The first ending taps into a deeper understanding of two of the characters, and how one of them got to this point. The second ending feels more like bombast, and while it’s visually inventive (and funny), it pushed too far over that line of plausibility for me.

Fiennes and Taylor-Joy both landed Golden Globe nominations for their performances as the leads in a musical/comedy, which seems about right – Colin Farrell should win over Fiennes, Michelle Yeoh or Emma Thompson should win over Taylor-Joy, but both of these performances were strong and integral to the film. It’s a relief to see Taylor-Joy get a decent role and deliver within it after the fiasco of her performance in Amsterdam, and it might be her best film work since the very underrated Thoroughbreds (although I haven’t seen the 2020 version of Emma). Fiennes’s performance feels like the Spock-with-a-goatee version of his director character from Hail, Caesar!, a particular style he’s practically trademarked but that this time he twists just enough to make it incredibly sinister – not purely evil, like You-know-who, but menacing, so you feel like something awful is coming but can’t quite put your finger on why until the awful somethings start. He plays Slowik as the black comedy version of Daniel Day-Lewis’s fashion designer in Phantom Thread. I was a little disappointed to see The Menu didn’t get a screenplay nomination at the Globes, but they only give out one screenplay honor, while the Oscars do two and thus have twice the number of nominations available, so I hold out a little hope on that front. Right now this is in my top 5 from 2022, although we still have a lot of big films to watch (notably Aftersun and The Fabelmans), and the fact that I can’t stop thinking about it is probably the highest compliment I can give The Menu. It’s imperfect, but still has so much good stuff in it that it’s worth accepting its flaws.