The Hawthorne Restaurant is the most exclusive dining experience reserved for the most elite members of society with a set menu across a four-hour dinner service in a dining room that seats only twelve guests a night.  Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) oversees the kitchen and his troupe of meticulous chefs, and the wait staff is led by the vigilant Elsa (Hong Chau) to ensure every detail is precise.  Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), a devout foodie, is thrilled to have secured a table at Hawthorne with his date, Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), but the dinner service begins to take a sinister turn come the second course and it is soon realized that Chef had hand selected tonight’s diners to teach them all a lesson and give them a meal that they will never forget. 

Mark Mylod directs The Menu for Searchlight Pictures from a sharply witty and satirical script penned by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy.  The 106-minute chamber piece slowly ratchets up the tension and the ire as Chef’s antics become more and more pointed against the diners he has held captive in his restaurant.  The thrills come as we begin to piece together the relationship that everyone has with Chef and how they have wronged him, all the while the dark humor keeps audiences just slightly unsure of where things are headed.  It is impossible not to place oneself in Hawthorne and cautiously stifle laughter knowing soon that Chef’s wrath may be pointed at you. 

The film opens with Tyler and Margot waiting for the yacht to take them to the island and the class difference between the two quickly becomes apparent as Tyler snaps and Margot to stop smoking, and later when they are eating their complimentary oyster, Margot clearly seems less enthused than everyone else about the sea foam emulsion served in the half shell.  The mystery is already afoot as Margot recognizes one of the guests they will be dining with this evening, Richard (Reed Birney), but she waves off any further questions from Tyler.  Once on the island, Elsa seems shaken as she greets the guests and realizes that Tyler made an unauthorized change to the guestlist by bringing Margot which only enhances our feeling of not belonging in this realm of elite dining and we begin feeling a little self-conscious as we munch away on our popcorn and M&Ms.  Ever the dutiful host, Elsa continues with a tour of the island showcasing the seashore where the scallops are being harvested for later, the fields in which the grains and vegetables are grown, the smokehouse where the proteins are dry aged to the exact moment before they start to turn, and the chef’s quarters where it is revealed that the staff all live on this island so that they can dedicate themselves wholly to the art. 

Here is where the film begins to state its thesis as it seeks to condemn the sanctification of art, art that should be for the people – for all people – but by bringing it up to such a high level where only the top tier of society can enjoy it, not only is it stripping that society at large from human expression but it is turning what should be an outlet of love into a chore to be examined and dissected.  The irony is not lost here on a website dedicated to “examining the stories we see on screen,” and the points made by the film are quite valid as it seeks to break down the gatekeeping that has arisen in many communities with the ease of being able to participate in online discourse with likeminded people that ends up turning hobbies into schoolwork.   

This is most clearly evidenced through Lillian (Janet McTeer), a food critic feared throughout the industry for turning on the restaurants she once praised when she finds the slightest infraction in their output.  She scoffs at a broken sauce in the second course, the truly hilarious “unaccompanied accompaniments,” a sauce which Tyler, a young man who has committed to memory every episode of Chef’s Table, quickly slurps down only a few tables away.  Margot, however, is not amused at this esoteric excuse of a deconstructed breadbasket and makes her displeasure known to which Tyler, showing some of his own elitist tendencies, quickly barks at her for embarrassing him and not blindly accepting this clear joke at the expense of the diners with a thankful attitude.  Later, Chef will dig into Tyler who likes to flaunt his knowledge of high end “food as art” technique for destroying the magic of the craft, a truly interesting and accurate observation that this culture which seems to reward knowing every exacting detail of something results in not the appreciation, but the depreciation, of the art form.  Like knowing where to look during a magic show to see when the switch happens, it takes all of the enjoyment out of the experience robbing both the artist of the thrill of their craft and the audience of their own enrichment.  

The argument about who art belongs to, the artist or the viewer, gets a little muddled when Chef begins to show contradiction in his own thesis by lashing out at George (John Leguizamo), a famous movie star who has begun cashing in on his name and taking less exciting and challenging roles knowing the power of his established brand is enough to market. In his conversations with Margot, it becomes clear that Chef is someone who takes pride in his work and expects others to take the same amount of pride in their own craft as evidenced by the caliber of the team he has assembled in the kitchen, but at the same time, he does not want the diners to think too critically of his menu. He brought George here so that he could punish the actor for signing on to a film that Chef found inferior, a film that the tired man spent a few precious hours on a Sunday – the only day away from the kitchen – watching and found himself insulted by the very simple script and the uninspired performance from Geroge. This crack signals a much darker reading of Chef, one that shows him to be a vindictive and selfish man who will flaunt his control at will to anyone who crosses him, even in the slightest of instances. The danger in the film is amplified as the final course is prepared and The Menu takes some incredibly dark turns in these last stages which, without the life vest of humor, forces audiences to reassess their own opinion of the artist along with the captive diners. 

The Menu finds Margo joining the ranks of the final girls, a troupe that has seen a recent spike in popularization as of late in the “good for her” genre of horror films that find these heroines not just surviving the mayhem, but also a systemic plight, too.  The “Mid-s’more-ar” ending leaves audiences laughing at both the absurdity of the moment and the nervousness experienced in coming down from what just happened.  Much like Margot, Mylod and his scriptwriting team’s eyes may have been a little bit bigger than their stomachs as the film seeks to touch on a little too many issues without ever fully delivering, especially in the bloated second act which appears to be setting the stage for a Ready or Not (2019) style romp across the island but it never racks up a significant body count and audiences expecting a joke-filled slasher will come away from this film disheartened. Much like Hawthorne’s tailored and inspired menu, everything on screen feels as if it were purposefully done to leave us hungry for more all the while scolding us for asking questions.