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The Menu, 2022
Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) agrees to accompany the wealthy Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) to a very expensive, very exclusive dining experience at a restaurant called Hawthorne that is located on an island. The head chef of Hawthorne is a finicky man named Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), whose dishes are highly conceptual mixes of foams, gels, actual rocks, and portion sizes that could fit in a thimble. But pretentious platings are the least of Margot's worries as the meal slowly devolves into psychological games with incredibly high stakes.
I saw this film in the theater expecting something enjoyably stupid, and I would say that the movie more than delivers on that front with fun performances, cheeky formatting, and an essential willingness to poke fun at both the victims and the monsters.
Taylor-Joy makes for a great lead, even if the character she's playing is pretty deep into stereotype territory. We've seen it in Ready or Not, we've seen it in countless films: the one plainspoken "common person" in among absurdly wealthy people. But Taylor-Joy is such a welcome presence and her frustrations so palpable that it doesn't matter so much that her character is overly familiar.
The rest of the cast is also on point. Hoult's wealthy, self-centered Tyler is a bit different than other evil-rich-guy characters, in ways I won't get into for fear of spoiling the plot. Tyler is obsessed with Slowik to an extreme, and that comes out in ways that are both surprising and absurd. The other patrons are played by a mix of familiar faces, including John Leguizamo as an actor whose career is on a downward trajectory, Judith Light as a woman whose husband seems to recognize Margot, Janet McTeer as a food critic with something to say about every dish and Paul Adelstein as her overly-deferential editor(?).
On the kitchen side of things, Ralph Fiennes does pretty good work with a character who, if we're honest, is maybe a bit underdeveloped. But you get the sense of someone battling with both a need for control and a need for authenticity, and the way those things intersect is interesting. A real standout for me was Hong Chau as Slowik's right-hand woman, Elsa, Elsa is a character who is hard and soft all at the same time, and I enjoyed every moment that she was on screen. Likewise, Christina Brucato has a memorable handful of minutes of screentime as a chef with some very interesting ideas about how to serve a meal.
Like I wrote earlier, the thing that I enjoyed the most was the willingness to make fun of everyone a bit. Slowik plays as a parody of the modern high-class chef, turning real vegetables into dots of gel and surrounding them with milk that has been turned into snow. But his anguish at having turned into an exclusive experience for terrible people grounds the character. At the same time, the customers in the restaurant are also kind of terrible, but not in ways that you usually get in films like this. Sure, one of them has a pretty icky secret. A few of them have done unethical things. But I'm not sure any of them (with one exception) has done something deserving of torture and death, not even by horror movie standards.
The one group that does feel a little underdeveloped is the staff. We get some sense of the cult-like conditions that exist on the island, but with a handful of exceptions, the staff are these nameless characters who do some pretty out there things with no sense of remorse. For a film with so many overt themes about social class consciousness, pushing all of the workers out of the narrative progression in favor of the wealthy customers and the famous chef seems kind of ironic.
My score might be generous, but I was entertained the entire time.
The Menu, 2022
Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) agrees to accompany the wealthy Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) to a very expensive, very exclusive dining experience at a restaurant called Hawthorne that is located on an island. The head chef of Hawthorne is a finicky man named Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), whose dishes are highly conceptual mixes of foams, gels, actual rocks, and portion sizes that could fit in a thimble. But pretentious platings are the least of Margot's worries as the meal slowly devolves into psychological games with incredibly high stakes.
I saw this film in the theater expecting something enjoyably stupid, and I would say that the movie more than delivers on that front with fun performances, cheeky formatting, and an essential willingness to poke fun at both the victims and the monsters.
Taylor-Joy makes for a great lead, even if the character she's playing is pretty deep into stereotype territory. We've seen it in Ready or Not, we've seen it in countless films: the one plainspoken "common person" in among absurdly wealthy people. But Taylor-Joy is such a welcome presence and her frustrations so palpable that it doesn't matter so much that her character is overly familiar.
The rest of the cast is also on point. Hoult's wealthy, self-centered Tyler is a bit different than other evil-rich-guy characters, in ways I won't get into for fear of spoiling the plot. Tyler is obsessed with Slowik to an extreme, and that comes out in ways that are both surprising and absurd. The other patrons are played by a mix of familiar faces, including John Leguizamo as an actor whose career is on a downward trajectory, Judith Light as a woman whose husband seems to recognize Margot, Janet McTeer as a food critic with something to say about every dish and Paul Adelstein as her overly-deferential editor(?).
On the kitchen side of things, Ralph Fiennes does pretty good work with a character who, if we're honest, is maybe a bit underdeveloped. But you get the sense of someone battling with both a need for control and a need for authenticity, and the way those things intersect is interesting. A real standout for me was Hong Chau as Slowik's right-hand woman, Elsa, Elsa is a character who is hard and soft all at the same time, and I enjoyed every moment that she was on screen. Likewise, Christina Brucato has a memorable handful of minutes of screentime as a chef with some very interesting ideas about how to serve a meal.
Like I wrote earlier, the thing that I enjoyed the most was the willingness to make fun of everyone a bit. Slowik plays as a parody of the modern high-class chef, turning real vegetables into dots of gel and surrounding them with milk that has been turned into snow. But his anguish at having turned into an exclusive experience for terrible people grounds the character. At the same time, the customers in the restaurant are also kind of terrible, but not in ways that you usually get in films like this. Sure, one of them has a pretty icky secret. A few of them have done unethical things. But I'm not sure any of them (with one exception) has done something deserving of torture and death, not even by horror movie standards.
The one group that does feel a little underdeveloped is the staff. We get some sense of the cult-like conditions that exist on the island, but with a handful of exceptions, the staff are these nameless characters who do some pretty out there things with no sense of remorse. For a film with so many overt themes about social class consciousness, pushing all of the workers out of the narrative progression in favor of the wealthy customers and the famous chef seems kind of ironic.
My score might be generous, but I was entertained the entire time.