The Menu

Saving It
For Dessert

The Menu
USA 2022
Directed by Mark Mylod
Fox Searchlight

Warning: Here be spoilers.

Just a quick shout out of a review of a movie I missed on its release towards the end of last year, The Menu. I kinda wanted to see this one but ran out of time on it. One of the reasons I wanted to see it is because I like Anya Taylor-Joy as an actress (Ralph Fiennes is none too shabby as a great performer either) and the other reason was because, from the trailer at least, you can tell something is really off. To me, it looked like a modern remake of The Hounds Of Zaroff (aka The Most Dangerous Game) and, yep, it’s doing something ever so slightly different but it’s certainly, in some ways, exploring the same kind of concept. Just without the manhunt (or at least, a highly abbreviated one).

This film, however, is set in the world of gourmet cooking. I’ve never really understood or appreciated the world of culinary delights. To me, food is something you shovel in quickly to stock up on energy so you can get the next thing done. I don’t fetishise it myself like a lot of people seem to do. This film involves 12 guests (just like the last supper, right?) who travel to Hawthorne Island to sample The Menu of the great Chef Slowik, played by Fiennes, at huge expense (some may say the ultimate expense). Guests such as a character played by Nicholas Hoult, his companion for the evening played by Taylor-Joy (yeah... you’ll get there real fast as to the nature of their relationship, well before the reveal) and a big league but washed up movie star played by John Leguizamo, who said he based the performance on Steven Seagal (apparently there’s no love lost between the two actors in real life).

The film is wrapped up in the language of food criticism and the slow, smooth, languorous shots which make up a lot of the running time are punctuated between scenes by the typographic announcement of menu items, which grow more humorous and ‘on point’ as the movie progresses. It also becomes clear, I think, that while the film is aimed at the kind of rich customers and their lack of true appreciation of food... those hated by Slowik... it’s also a send up of the entire food industry in some ways. Certainly, the restaurant which is the only structure on its own island (the rich clientele gathering on the docks to be picked up by a boat to take them to their gourmet experience) is based on one which the writer went to and realised he was technically captive their until the meal was over and the boat came to pick the customers back up.

And it kinda works. It’s maybe just a little overlong but it manages to land the humour and horror of the situation in which the guests find themselves and it also shows the keen intelligence of ‘the person least likely’, who has more in common with the chef and his army of helpers, in that she understands the foreshadowing of events (such as when the guests are served no bread as a bread plate, being just left the sauces that go with it... which she correctly perceives as an insult rather than a piece of conceptual food art) and is able to figure out a way to put herself on the same footing as the madman running the whole show.

And I said it was a short review... I only have to shout out Colin Stetson’s fine score (sadly not on CD... honestly, Milan Records were a great label once) and conclude that, those four courses of paragraphs that I just served comprise the entire meal of this review. I quite liked The Menu and, though it’s maybe a close cousin to the many movies which steal the plot of The Most Dangerous Game... it’s certainly something else too and that shouldn’t stop you from taking a bite out of this particular food themed film.