The Menu (2022) poster

The Menu (2022)

Rating:


USA. 2022.

Crew

Director – Mark Mylod, Screenplay – Seth Reiss & Will Tracy, Producers – Will Ferrell, Betsy Koch & Adam McKay, Photography – Peter Deming, Music – Colin Stetson, Visual Effects – Crafty Apes (Supervisor – Marc Smith), Special Effects Supervisor – Aaron Failing, Makeup Effects – Roy Garcia & Roy Wooley, Production Design – Ethan Tobman. Production Company – Hyperobject Industries/Gary Sanchez.

Cast

Ralph Fiennes (Chef Julian Slowik), Anya Taylor-Joy (Margot Mills), Nicholas Hoult (Tyler), John Leguizamo (Movie Star), Hong Chau (Elsa), Janet McTeer (Lillian Bloom), Reed Birney (Richard), Aimee Carrero (Felicity), Judith Light (Anne), Paul Adelstein (Ted), Rob Yang (Bryce), Arturo Castro (Soren), Mark St. Cyr (Dave), Rebecca Koon (Linda), Matthew Cornwell (Jeremy)


Plot

A group of selected guests are invited to Hawthorne, the exclusive restaurant run by Chef Julian Slowik on an island offshore. Once seated, Slowik produces an exquisitely formal dinner that is designed as an artistic event. As becomes apparent throughout the evening, Slowik has issues with all of the guests and each of the courses is designed as an elaborate act of revenge.


There haven’t been many films about the horrors of eating before. The best in the field that comes to mind is Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), followed by the extraordinarily perverse Feed (2005) about feeder fetishism. There has also been individual episodes of anthologies like Taxidermia (2006), The Theatre Bizarre (2011) and Late Night Double Feature (2016). The work that perhaps most resembles The Menu is Bitter Feast (2010) wherein chef James Le Gros imprisons food critic Joshua Leonard determined to exact revenge for his caustic reviews. There was also the recent The Feast (2021), although that took a more supernatural explanation.

The film comes with a script from Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, who had previously worked with The Onion News Network, while Reiss has a history writing for stand-up. The experience was apparently inspired by Tracy’s visit to the Cornelius Sjømatrestaurant, a high-end restaurant on an island near Bergen in Norway, while on his honeymoon and imagining a nightmare version of the scenario.

The film was at one point to be directed by Alexander Payne. The director to take the reins was Mark Mylod who had previously made a handful of unexceptional comedies with Ali G in Da House (2002), The Big White (2005) and What’s Your Number? (2011) and since in the mid-1990s has directed a great deal of tv, first in the UK and then in the US, including shows such as Entourage (2004-11), United States of Tara (2009-11), Game of Thrones (2011-9) and Succession (2018-23), having won a stack of awards for the latter. The film is produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay and their Hyperobject Industries who have been behind Succession, Don’t Look Up (2021) and Fresh (2022), another film the same year that blends fine dining and horror.

Margot Mills (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) in The Menu (2022)
Margot Mills (Anya Taylor-Joy) converses with Chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes)

The Menu starts out as a satire on the snobbery and artistic pretensions of fine dining. Reiss and Tracy wind this up an eleven on the dial – from the kitchen hands precision arranging the placement of items on a plate with tweezers to the serving of a bread dish minus the bread with merely the seasonings, to tacos with laser-imprinted secrets of illegal transactions and affairs. While there are plentiful finger severings, suicides and stabbings about the only thing we do not get is human bodies cooked or body parts served up, which is the one beeline almost all of the abovelisted epicurean horrors head for.

The film flies on a fantastic script. One that is dry, sardonic and endlessly making fun of the sophistication of pretensions and then turning around to skewer the guests for the crassness of lacking that self-same snobbery. The script snakes around on itself, trapping characters in their own self-importance and then pulling the carpet out. All before reaching an ending that is hilarious – Anya Taylor-Joy and her cheeseburger win the day hands down.

The film is served by a great cast. Ralph Fiennes fills the role of the chef with a sublime hauteur. Anya Taylor-Joy, the brightest star among the current crop of young actors, is on exceptional form. The cast is filled out with some great performers in small roles – John Leguizamo, Judith Light who has been making quite a comeback in the last couple of years, and Hong Chau.

(Winner in this site’s Top 10 Films of 2022 list. Nominee for Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor (Ralph Fiennes) at this site’s Best of 2022 Awards).


Trailer here


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