Ever since some naked chick took a bite out of a spiked apple after some prodding from a snake, food has always served as an irresistible metaphor for artists, laymen, morons, and geniuses all the same. Need to give some righteous justice to the cretins who hurt your daughter? Well, turn their insatiable appetites against them, Mr. Andronicus, and serve them up one of their buddies for dinner without letting them in on the bit. Want to heighten the absurd and joyful eroticism in your romantic comedy? Set it in a noodle shop! Want your quartet of Italian movie stars to die as ironic victims of their own suicidal excess? Why not stuff them silly to the point that Catherine Denueve refuses to speak to her partner – one of the stars – for the whole of the Cannes Film Festival? But, as of recently, the class politics inherent in the very preparation, production, and eating of food has taken a particularly obvious role in the kind of milquetoast arthouse flick beloved by the kind of person enticed by the glamor of five-star dishes and various exotic fishes but who has the cognizance that this whole enterprise may be, in fact, bad. I’m thinking of Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness when I say this and how it shares a bevy of similarities with Mark Mylod’s The Menu, a dark “horror-comedy” that owes a great deal to Netflix’s Chef’s Table and other high-class cooking shows and has the stench of its producer’s odious approach to political cinema all over it. Yes, folks, this is an Adam McKay production, so you know you’re going to get the hoariest possible messaging paired with a pared-down approach to genre cinema. It makes Ostlund’s underwhelming Palme-winner look like an apoplectic screed by comparison, and yes, both hinge upon the delight of a cheeseburger as a way of suggesting where loyalties truly lie.
But, to wit: If you are ever invited to a private island in the middle of nowhere to taste a whole series of delightful dishes prepared by a cult-like kitchen crew and invented by an ideologue chef, you might want to go ahead and hire both security and a food taster, given that you probably have the dough to do so. Sure, it might not do too much, especially given how the courses prepared by a glowering dude like Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) for his wealthy patrons aren’t just poisoned – that would be too simple, after all, and doesn’t the almond taste of cyanide just spoil the complexion of a dis – but it might provide you with a more obvious means of escape than the ones that Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) attempts throughout the meal. She’s not of the caste that attends such events, only brought to it by Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), a rich customer and the kind of sycophantic fan who at one point might have rolled up on a President simply to prove the depths of his “affectionate” obsession. Slowik notices this early on, and tries to goad her into choosing her affiliation: With the “eaters” at the tables, the food critics and actors and finance guys who consume without a second thought, or those in the back of house who slave over hot stoves for their enjoyment. This is, of course, an essential distinction, even though the outcome will remain unchanged: Everybody in that room that night is going to die, and that is by design. Their mass murder will complete the night’s menu in an orgiastic fashion, where they themselves will fuse with the foodstuff to create something truly unique.
Props to Mylod for casting Fiennes in the key role here, as his antagonist remains compelling even as the film slowly drifts away into a kind of restrained and stilted madness. He is, of course, a particularly ferocious actor, with Mylod and his writers’ attempts at providing him some manner of psychological shading crumbling under the sheer intensity of Fiennes’ deadpan. Whether he’s ranting about s’mores or rending his guests’ a set of new assholes, he remains an engaging archetype, a kind of prim Gordon Ramsey, whose command of blunt critical language and its deployment is unparalleled on television. The very nature of the transaction lies on the boundaries of dominance and submission, with fairness only established by currency. Fiennes, like Ramsey in his reality shows, is a masterful dom forced to powerbottom by the nature of his industry.
This is what Margot is ultimately clued into throughout her evening – no matter the presence and power of the chef, the customer is always right, with the demands of the table being the only thing that can crack through the rigidity of authorial presence. Sure, the food is crafted and you’re instructed on the best way to experience it through a concocted persuasion: that’s the whole point of the setting, after all, a private enclave where one can down delights in the purest possible way, where the evening’s tastes are delineated and structured in a way to tell a story, albeit with an extra amount of cathartic irony (which, even here, is occasionally funny). Yes, folks, we have arrived at our central metaphor, asses firmly pointed backward, which is about filmmaking and the relationship between the director and his audiences. Of course, the finance guys are in this and are prominent victims. They are false gods, poor excuses for masters as well as one’s ultimate failure, whereas the only real one is the customer with the courage to refuse to play the game by the author’s rules – not, of course, the critic, who believes they understand the game and how it’s being played.
All of this would be well and good if not for two things that ultimately spoil the broth. The first is that The Menu‘s ending is self-defeating in the way that makes the entire enterprise feel somewhat meaningless, which is sort of McKay’s entire ethos as a filmmaker and producer. He throws up his hands and imagines annihilation instead of anything else, a kind of reflexive cynicism that’s only vaguely defined by the suggestion of an alternative solution and man’s “realistic” inability to achieve it. The exploitation of the relationship between cook and client is the way that Margot digs into it, with a Kane-like suggestion of a lost and tragic youthful idealism meant to provide a kind of pathos to complement the fact that a big and powerful man like Slowik just wants to be told what to do, but it adds the side effect of reinforcing the system that Mylod and McKay want to critique. It’s unfulfilling in the way that many of these dishes appear to be, centered around the ephemeral pleasure of one finally grasping complexity but so thin and airy that it lacks any substance.
The second fault is directly related: This is a prestige picture, with the budget of your average mid-grade studio-adjacent production and the manners to match, whose primary influence is so present throughout that you can practically hear Vivaldi’s “Winter” playing over every slow motion circling of across a dish meant to look like a rock covered in peat moss. Pure genre or arthouse cinema has Mylod and McKay beat in pure shock value, which means the distinct pungency of La Grand Bouffe or Eating Raoul or even one of Romero’s zombie movies as metaphors of consumption, physical or psychological or otherwise, is more outwardly obvious and enticing. Like the appetizers, entrees, and apertifs so lovingly filmed here, The Menu is a fetish object styled as an indulgent antidote to unearned pretension, one meant to be appreciated, not to be enjoyed. It acts neither as pure sustenance or opulent revelation but merely as occasionally stimulating filler in the same way that mid-shift cigarettes shared with the dishwashers next to the dumpsters are after the dinner rush.