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.
This is just the first in a series of increasingly bizarre food courses, each accompanied by Chef Slowik’s falsely profound explanations of how each course makes some kind of statement. Each course is increasingly insulting, increasingly accompanied by some form of violent revenge—revenge that is essentially banal, and even unmerited, as when he murders the angel investor who paid for Chef Slowik to have a place to demonstrate his artistry. In the typical revenge horror film—Seven, for example, or the Saw films—these kind of judgment-tortures would be guided by a sense of justice in the audience’s mind, but here they aren’t: they’re increasingly contrary to justice and rationality. At one point, Slowik himself becomes the victim of this revenge scheme: one of the courses consists of him being stabbed in the thigh (or perhaps the groin?) as punishment for his own sexual harassment of one of his sou-chefs. In the very next scene, however, he is totally unscathed. Meanwhile, the guests are either masochistically enthusiastic about their own impending doom, or helplessly drawn in by the illusions, including a fake rescue that Chef Slowik has arranged.
But just when the viewer begins to suspect that The Menu will be just the latest in the recent trend of films designed to insult the audience for bothering to show up (such as Gone Girl, or, really, anything from Gillian Flynn), it takes another unexpected twist. Chef Slowik calls Margot into his office for a chat. It turns out he sympathizes with her—he feels a sympathy with her. She wasn’t supposed to be here this evening; Tyler was supposed to bring a different date, and substituted her instead, which has thrown off his careful plan. He offers her the chance to escape death—but she refuses to play his game at all.
The climactic moment comes when Margot, discovering that Slowik started out working as a cook in a fast-food burger joint, speaks up in front of the other guests: she’s tired of his pretentious, nihilistic, violent “courses.” She’s hungry. She wants a burger—an old fashioned cheeseburger, without any of the fuss, and she wants it to go. Slowik, smiling nostalgically, complies, and Margo escapes as the rest of the guests and restaurant staff, proceed to their doom.
Critics from RogerEbert.com to the Wall Street Journal’s usually astute Kyle Smith have taken the film at face value—as a satire on fancy restaurants or on the privilege of the wealthy and powerful, and to some extent it is the latter. But the movie is not about restaurants at all. It’s an allegory in which Chef Slowik represents Hollywood itself. Self-righteous, self-obsessed, pseudo-intellectual, nihilistic, violent, and senseless, his view of justice is totally perverse—even his self-criticism, manifested by the stabbing which parallels the faux mea culpas of the Harvey Weinstein affair. Alternately flattered and feared by critics who are just as blind to the world as they are, the studios serve course after course of insults, cheap sentiment, false cleverness, and clichés—too fixated on what they imagine is their own artistry to realize that they’ve failed the first element of their art: to tell meaningful and moving stories. Is it any wonder that the only character Studio-Slowik feels any connection to is a hooker?
Margot—ironically played by the same actress whose recent A Night in Soho is a perfect specimen of the awful, cheap and easy pseudo-righteousness served up by Social Justice Hollywood—is a genuine heroine, for the simple reason that she alone keeps her perspective. It’s a restaurant, she says; she’s the customer; it’s their job to serve her food, not to bully and berate her. She wants a cheeseburger—and it’s not wrong for her to expect a simple evening with a satisfying cheeseburger. And making that, in fact, is the only moment when the food-producer feels good about his job. Hollywood, the film is telling us, should return to its roots in making entertainment—making it well, of course, and making it smart—but making it without deluding itself, or trying to delude the public.
If I’m right in my interpretation of The Menu, it may be among the cleverest satires ever made: one that has escaped the notice of precisely those who are being speared. And yet at the same time, that may make it all the more infuriating—in that even in puncturing the most grotesque of Hollywood’s current-day illusions, it is engaging in just another illusion. Preaching against the inanity of the film industry’s recent decades of Message Films is, after all, just another message. Margot is right that what we should expect of Hollywood—what we, as consumers have a right to demand of Hollywood—is a simple and well-made cheeseburger, rather than being insulted by hypocrites whose knowledge of justice is hand-me-downs from John Rawls or Herbert Marcuse. But then the best alternative isn’t to denounce the wrong, but to make and promote the good. Director Mark Mylod and writers Seth Reiss and Will Tracy have had their fun and made a valid point. But it’s time now to make some genuinely good movies.
Update: Abigail Nussbaum, one of the smartest critics there is (although, alas, a socialist) comes close to catching on when she writes “The issue isn't that Slowik is bad, but that he's making his point badly…. The story that The Menu is telling is about an artist who has forgotten how to communicate with his audience.” Yes—that’s just the point!
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