Film Review: The Menu is a savage satire aimed at the pretentious world of high-end dining

Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy in The Menu. Picture: Eric Zachanowich. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. 

★★★★☆

Hawthorn Island is ‘the base camp of Mount Bullshit’ according to Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) as The Menu (16s) begins, and that’s before she has even arrived on Hawthorn Island and the restaurant presided over by the legendary Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes).

A law unto himself when it comes to fine dining, Chef Slowik isn’t content with serving food, but insists on crafting his menu as ‘conceptual story-telling’.

Alas for his guests, Chef Slowik has something of a horror story in mind for the evening’s fare. As one ridiculously curated course succeeds another, the customers — among them, foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), restaurant critic Lilian (Janet McAteer), and fading movie star (John Leguizamo) — gradually come to realise they’ll be paying the ultimate price for Chef Slowik’s food to die for.

Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult in The Menu Picture: Eric Zachanowich. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. 

Written by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, and directed by Mark Mylod, The Menu is a savage satire aimed at the pretentious world of high-end dining and the patrons paying for the privilege. Ralph Fiennes is compelling as the egotistical Chef Slowik, initially a figure of fun but eventually a monstrous creation who wields the power of life and death. It’s a role that might well have been written specifically for Fiennes, whose patrician demeanour and deadpan delivery are perfectly pitched, and he gets strong support from Anya Taylor-Joy as Margot, a no-nonsense woman who’s encountered more than her fair share of emperors wearing no clothes, and Nicholas Hoult as a pathetic food obsessive who reveres Chef Slowik as a modern demi-god.

Neatly crafted in the first half, when the tension builds as we wonder exactly how insane Chef Slowik really is, the film becomes more heavy-handed in its second half as the story substitutes a sledgehammer for its filleting knife. That said, it’s a hugely entertaining takedown of the absurdity of fine dining taken to its illogical extreme, and one that revels in its lunacy.

(cinema release)