Reviewers of the strange new horror movie The Menu seem to me to have missed the point—and to have done so in precisely the way the film’s creators wanted them to. And that very fact may make the film all the more delicious.
The Menu seems at first to be an “elevated horror” movie of the A24 variety. A group of strangers arrives at the dock for a trip to an island which is the site of a fantastically elegant restaurant called Hawthorne, presided over by Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). The castaways of this three-hour tour include the unnamed Movie Star (John Leguizamo), the critic Lillian (Janet McTeer), three guys who are apparently ripping off the studio where the Movie Star works (Rob Yang, Mark St. Cyr, and Arturo Castro), and others. Our main character is Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) who’s the date of restaurant enthusiast Tyler (Nicholas Hoult). We later learn that she’s actually a prostitute, but we discover right away that she’s a bit of a rebel, who thinks all this fancy Hawthorne stuff is rather ridiculous.
But very early in the movie we begin to see that this “elevated horror” movie is actually an allegory of some sort. One of the first courses is a “breadless bread plate,” which consists only of the sauces, without the bread. Chef Slowik explains that this is a kind of political commentary on the fact that the poor people of the world can’t afford bread. Critic Lillian is enchanted by the sophistication of Slowik’s radical chic, and Tyler is in awe of the Chef’s genius—which is a little jarring to the audience because it’s really not that clever. It’s the kind of tired cliché that we’re used to from Hollywood—and that realization dawns at just the moment when Margot speaks up in protest. The guests are being insulted, she points out, and she refuses to go along with it.
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