It is amazing that chefs do not regard their customers with more contempt. Between accommodating the endless need for substitutions and sending food back, to say nothing of garden-variety rudeness, their patience is borderline superhuman. Then again, maybe the professionals who make our food are more adept at hiding their contempt than we think. Who knows how many times they spit in our entrée, or worse? The Menu, the new dark comedy from Succession veteran Mark Mylod, comes from a place of sly empathy for them. It unfolds like a macabre fantasy for anyone in the service industry who dreamed of telling their customer that they’re not always right.
Screenwriters Seth Reiss and Will Tracy waste no time and plunge us into the world of elite fine dining. A dozen guests gather on a dock to visit Hawthorne, a high-end restaurant on an island that requires a ferry ride. Our entry point is Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), an obsessive foodie, and his date Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy). Like many self-contained thrillers, Mylod shoots each leg of the journey so we can better understand how the guests cannot escape the dining room. There is an undercurrent of hostility in how the lead server Elsa (an unnerving Hong Chau) politely leads the guests on a tour, a feeling that the head chef Julian (Ralph Fiennes) underscores. Most of the guests treat him with reverence, except for some finance bros who think the hefty price tag automatically earns them the right to behave however they want.
The dinner starts relatively normally, with Julian opting for deconstructed dishes that are meant to get his guests thinking about their relationship with food. Mylod includes helpful title cards for each course, so we can read each ingredient, a flourish that leads to some great sight gags. As the evening continues, that undercurrent of hostility is more overt: one personalized course arrives with an invasion of privacy, and Julian frames another high-concept course around sudden violence. It is then Julian reveals his real purpose. He and his team are part of a food-centric suicide cult, and no one on the island will survive the night.
Fiennes’ performance is key to The Menu’s overall effect. He plays Julian like a cross between Primo, Tony Shalhoub’s chef character from Big Night who values purity above all else, and Hannibal Lecter. To him, cooking is an expression of his soul, and by reaching the upper echelons of fine dining, he has no choice but to make food for people who are rude, thankless and vulgar. Wealth is an important undercurrent to the film, although that is only one small part of it. Over the course of the meal, we learn what most of the guests have done to “deserve” their imminent deaths. Sometimes Julian spells it out for us, and in the case of Tyler – who transforms from a twerp to a monster – we can sort of understand why the kitchen staff would do something so drastic.
What makes this all so funny is not just Mylod’s sense of surprise, but how the guests react to it. After being told there is no escape and they will die, they continue through the motions of the meal, commenting on each dish as if it’s a normal evening. There is a Buñuel influence in how surreal the meal becomes, although the subplot between Margot and Julian keeps the film somewhat grounded. She is the only guest who is unfamiliar with Julian’s reputation, and her healthy skepticism leads to an interesting crossroads: Julian takes pity on her, so she must decide whether her sympathies are with the guests or the kitchen. Taylor-Joy is a plausible protagonist, despite her striking looks, because her performance cuts through all the pretense Hawthorne offers. How and when she decides to assert herself is where The Menu becomes a more traditional thriller, including a funny battle of wills that borrows heavily from Ratatouille, another film about the tensions within fine dining.
One of Julian’s 12 guests is a food critic. She uses absurd language to dissect each course, and we learn that over her career, she championed Julian while also demolishing the livelihood of other chefs. Julian is keenly aware of her influence, leading to the film’s true theme: the good-faith obligation between an artist and their audience. Surely Julian has served wealthy, grateful, otherwise ordinary people who met his rigorous dining demands the way he intended. None of them are at Hawthorne this particular evening, and instead his ingenious menu is a treatise on how – time and time again – diners and other audiences fail their creators. The expression and interpretation of creativity is a two-way street, and at an extreme case like Hawthorne, there is a breakdown because one side has vanity to forget that obligation.
Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
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