The Menu

For Ralph Fiennes’ char­ac­ter chef Slowik in Mark Mylod’s The Menu, revenge is a dish best served on a cres­cent of edi­ble puce foam and with an air-fried chico­ry wafer bal­anc­ing on top. We are bussed direct­ly into a min­i­mal­ist lifestyle world of elite fine din­ing where a ges­tic­u­lat­ing gag­gle of one-dimen­sion­al nas­ties have man­aged to secure a table at the world-famous seat of exper­i­men­tal gas­tron­o­my – Hawthorne. Slowik acts as mas­ter of cer­e­monies for a sense-chal­leng­ing, mul­ti-course cav­al­cade of dis­rup­tion and dis­cord, as his fiendish con­coc­tions come with built-in moral lessons and are intend­ed to chal­lenge any and all pre­con­cep­tions we have about food.

Unlike Slowik, whose mur­der­ous fix­a­tion with sub­tle flavour com­bi­na­tions has dri­ven him to cre­ative fren­zy, Mylod, along with screen­writ­ers Seth Reiss and Will Tra­cy, are very keen to show the dull sim­plic­i­ty of their work­ing ear­ly on. It’s clear from the open­ing pre­am­ble that some twist­ed shit is about to go down, as Hong Chau’s maître is open­ly aggres­sive and patro­n­is­ing towards the guests before they’ve even had a chance to take a seat. In the aggres­sive­ly polite world of din­ing – fine or oth­er­wise – this rings a very false note, and it’s one that is repeat­ed through­out a film in which the mak­ers don’t real­ly have any answer for why the din­ers remain in place to be abused.

The film can be summed up as, what if one of the bad Saw sequels took place in a restau­rant not dis­sim­i­lar to Copenhagen’s con­cep­tu­al­ly-enlight­ened Noma? Slowik, for rea­sons that are nev­er made clear, rolls out a tast­ing menu he con­sid­ers to be his pièce de résis­tance, and rather than pro­vide his pun­ters with the sim­ple enjoy­ment that comes from sus­te­nance, he is more inter­est­ed in prod­ding the metaphor­i­cal sores of their pri­vate back­grounds and humil­i­at­ing them for pet­ty moral infrac­tions where the pun­ish­ment far out­weighs the crime. 

Per­haps unin­ten­tion­al­ly, The Menu is a film that assumes a con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal stance in ask­ing us to cheer on the rit­u­al tor­ture of sundry tech bros, food crit­ics, a man who has com­mit­ted infi­deli­ty, an over-the-hill film actor, and an extreme food­ie played by Nico­las Hoult who just doesn’t seem to be of this planet.

Our one locus of respite with­in this gang of deplorables is Anya Taylor-Joy’s Mar­got, who was invit­ed by Hoult’s char­ac­ter on a whim and is not part of chef Slowik’s grand scheme. The pun­gent whiff of design­er cyn­i­cism per­vades every scene, so not only is it dif­fi­cult to under­stand why these din­ers aren’t tak­ing their busi­ness else­where (which they absolute­ly would do if they’re the cap­i­tal­ist scum we’re told they are), but it’s dif­fi­cult to give two hoots as to whether they stay or go.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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