Title: The Menu
Rating: 5 Stars
Hawthorn is an exclusive restaurant. It’s on an island that is only approachable by boat. It only has one seating per night. The seating can only accommodate about a dozen guests. The staff live on the island and are completely subservient to the chef. The chef, Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), is a world famous culinary genius with an absolute commitment to his craft. For this night, the chef has a special menu planned.
The guests are an eclectic bunch. There’s a bunch of tech / finance bros looking to get loud and drunk. There’s the washed up actor (John Leguizamo) looking to find a way to possibly resuscitate his career. There’s the pretentious restaurant critic known for her career breaking acerbic reviews. There’s the elderly couple that are regulars at Hawthorn. And then there is the hyper eager amateur foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) and his date Margo (Anya Taylor-Joy). Their relationship is a bit muddled because they don’t seem to know much about each other (he doesn’t even know her last name) and maybe her name isn’t even Margo.
As the evening unfolds, the menu courses become stranger. Some expose the foibles and crimes of the guests. One course exposes the financial fraud being committed by the tech bros. During one course, the sous-chef commits suicide as part of its presentation. The customers are horrified but are told that they can’t leave. Their culinary evening is turning into a nightmare.
We see most of this through the eyes of Margo. She is the only one there that can see that the emperor has no clothes. When they are served a bread course consisting of no bread, while all of the others are proclaiming the ironic genius of this act, she is calling bullshit and declaring that she’s hungry. Slowik knows that Margo does not belong here. She was a last minute replacement after Tyler’s previous relationship ended. Even as Slowik regrets Margo’s presence, he knows that she can’t not be part of the events of the night.
What is Slowik’s purpose here? Who, if anyone, will survive? What are the secrets that have compelled each guests’ presence?
Since it’s a new release, I don’t want to ruin it with too many spoilers. In case you can’t tell from the above summary, it’s a black comedy horror film. As you can tell from my rating, I loved it. This is one of those relatively rare films where I repeatedly laughed out loud.
There might be a highly personal reason why I loved this film so much. I don’t share a lot of personal detail in this blog, but know that I am not a foodie. When I was growing up in a working class neighborhood, eating in our car at Arby’s counted as a big dinner out for my family. Even now, I enjoy burger joints and diners with cranky waitresses of a certain age over haute cuisine.
However, many years ago I was in a long term relationship with a hard core foodie. Even minor meals were complicated by the fact that she hated eating ‘useless’ calories. She and I once planned a weekend vacation in Napa just to eat at Thomas Keller’s French Laundry. We even planned a Nordic vacation that included a local Swedish plane flight and then an hour long taxi ride to get to some remote part of BFE Sweden just to eat at Magnus Nilsson’s Fäviken. Hell, once we even went to a Michelin starred restaurant located on an island accessible only by boat.
So, I could one hundred percent relate to this film. The things that it skewers are things that are, at best, only fairly minor exaggerations of things I actually witnessed. I was there at single seating dinners with probably less than 20 guests (yes, these were insanely expensive, especially compared to the diner with the cranky waitress of a certain age). I was there when the chef (or sous-chef) would stand in front of all of us and carefully describe the very specific details of each of the twenty or so courses that we were about to be served. With each serving, the waiter would stop by with their very specific recommendation of a wine pairing and why, in detail, it was such a perfect match. Sure, no sous-chef committed suicide in front of us, but at the French Laundry, my partner and I were invited back to the kitchen, where the staff worked in absolute seriousness, silence, and sterility.
So, having that background, this film was boundlessly entertaining. I was especially taken with Tyler. His eagerness, obsequiousness to the chef, over analysis of every dish, even his surreptitious photos (including slapping Margo’s hand away as she reached for the food and possibly spoiling his shot) were spot on for the foodies that I have known. The restaurant critic with her toady of a dinner partner was wonderful. From my days in tech, I’ve known tech bros dropping money on something that they can’t appreciate just because they can. In fact, I heard an anecdote that Thomas Keller was once called in, at a very high price I’m sure, to design an evening dinner for a group of wealthy tech bros. As the evening progressed, Keller became so disenchanted with their boorish behavior that, for one course, he sent in a six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Far from chastened, apparently the bros clapped in appreciation.
In short, I thought that I’d seen the best comedy of the year when I watched Nicholas Cage’s brilliant The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent but, possibly for the very personal reasons that I’ve just described, The Menu might have actually surpassed it.
dorkenstein 