The Menu

Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy in “The Menu.” 20^th Century Studios/Eric Zachanowich photo via IMDB

“We have reached the base camp of Mount Bullshit.”

So says Margot Mills (Anya Taylor-Joy) as she eavesdrops on her fellow diners awaiting a meal at what may be the most exclusive restaurant on the planet. It's on idyllic little Hawthorne Island. You have to catch a boat – a yacht, actually – to get there.The reservation list is limited to 12, they pay more than $12,000 each.

The line pretty well sums up the movie. 

(A redeeming quality of writing a blog like this– as opposed to film reviews for a daily newspaper – is that you can quote a sentence like that without worrying about how some editor or irate reader feels about it. It doesn't make up for getting paid for your words, but it is, uh, liberating.)

Obviously the clientel for this elite eatery comes from that much maligned demographic, the one-percenters. They're happy to pay that big tab to call themselves foodies. They've got as much taste as money can buy; they're full of pompous pretense in place of actual imagination. Among them are restaurant critics and influencers; a bored billionaire couple who can't think of what else to do with their money; a washed-up screen star and his manager planning a travel-dining TV series; and a whole table full of yuppie finance guys. 

Margot's date Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) is the most pathetic of all, a snob wannabe, craving the approval of the restaurant's celebrity Chef Julian Slowick (Ralph Fiennes) the way a puppy craves petting.

Dinner companions like these make the vacuous but entitled “White Lotus” cast seem like a scintillating fun bunch in comparison. What Margot is doing among them, how she got here, is the first mystery in Seth Reiss and Will Tracy's script. It's also what Chef Slowick wants to know, once he makes his first skin-crawling entrance from the demonstration kitchen to the gorgeous dining room.

While “The Menu” calls itself a comedy, it's a dark, gross one. Is the term “dark comedy” a euphemism for saying it's not funny? The fact IMDB calls it a comedy-horror-thriller suggests the website isn't sure what to make of it, either.

But from Chef Slowick's first appearance, his words slithering from his lips, a truly fiendish glint in his eye, you know this meal won't end well … unless we're speaking of just desserts.

Are we talking Donner Party cuisine here? Each course on the menu is accompanied by a written description onscreen, and by the time we get to the one called “The Mess,” things have gotten bloody unappetizing indeed.

With his humorless manager Elsa (Hong Chau) running the dining room, Chef Slowick's meticulous kitchen staff responds to the whiplike clap of his hands with a robotic, “Yes, Chef!” Any echo of “Sieg heil!” is purely intentional.

Under Mark Mylod's direction, cinematographer Peter Deming mixes pristine images of the island's natural serenity with what has become the lethal claustrophobia of the dining room. Is the menu's “theme” an environmental statement– a comment on the way humans disrupt the ecological balance of nature? That's a question to chew on for the guests who by now are locked into a saga of simple survival. 

“The Menu” is part of a glut of “eat the rich” dark comedies hitting movie and TV screens these days. “The White Lotus” ushered in this trend of uncomfortable entertainments focusing on obnoxiously rich Americans, and was handsomely rewarded with a bunch of Emmys. But Chef Slowick's grand design – the overarching theme of his menu – never comes into clear focus as the movie around him tests the audience's gag reflexes by upping the ante for grossing them out. Are Chef and his kitchen Nazis environmental crusaders, or class war commandoes intent on stewing the obscenely rich in their own juices? Or is he, like Nicolas Cage's character in “Pig,” a formerly passionate culinary artist who became disillusioned serving his pretentious, entitled, utterly nauseating clientele?

It's a great asset having Anya Taylor-Joy trying to sort out these mysteries for us. Her face, and the intelligence lurking in her overly large eyes have the same mesmerizing effect they had in “The Queen's Gambit.” She, along with Fiennes, got Golden Globe nominations for their performances. Hers is the delicious one; his is more pungent. Unfortunately, her quote that opens this blog is the best line in the script. It's uttered in the film's first minutes, but it's all downhill from there.

Although “The Menu” seems to want to target the entitlement of the obnoxiously wealthy, its target audience is precisely the people it pretends to skewer. They're the only ones who will get the “joke” of the diners' snobbery. Laughing at the characters on screen provides them with an out, the illusion that they're not guilty of the same sort of entitlement. It gets them off the hook for their own outsize role in wealth inequality. It provides them with the conceit that the movie isn't about them.

While “The Menu” raises plenty of provocative questions to graze on, the script loses interest before bothering to answer them. For all it feeds us, it still leaves us hungry at the end.