“We’re at base camp for Mount Bullshit” says Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), the least pretentious patron to travel to an exclusive island restaurant called Hawthorn, where the reclusive, globally celebrated Chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) has prepared a lavish tasting menu for select special guests.
Arriving on the island by charter boat, the evening unfolds with increasing tension at each of the guest tables as secrets are revealed and unexpected courses are served. With wild and violent events occurring, Slowik’s motivation begins to rattle the diners as it becomes increasingly apparent that his elaborate menu is designed to engulf all in a shocking finale.
One can’t help wonder if Seth Reiss and Will Tracy’s script owes a debt to John Lanchester’s novel, The Debt to Pleasure, in which the preface exclaims: “A menu can embody the anthropology of a culture or the psychology of an individual; it speaks to the sociology, psychology and biology of its creator and its audience, and of course, to their geographical location. It can be an ordering, a manifestation, a memory a fantasy, a consolation, an allusion, an illusion,…a summoning, an incantation murmured under the breath as the torchlights sink lower and the forest looms taller and the wolves howl louder and the fire prepares for its submission to the encroaching dark”.
That’s a striking sumation of the tone and ethos of their film, THE MENU.
This is cinema of cruelty, Buneul territory, with a script of culinary linguistics and a cast that feeds on it, is nourished by it, finds its subtleties and finesse.
Starting with an Amuse bouche, THE MENU serves five courses of biting satire ending with a flourish of just desserts.
Directed by Mark Mylod, THE MENU offers strong meat and bitter herbs, simmered in unease, sauteed in suspense, skewered on sophisticated snobbery.
Poisonously funny, THE MENU is a concoction of the raw and the cooked, creation and imagination, art and violence.
Bon appetit!
