Dying While Still Hungry

The Menu
Directed by Mark Mylod
Produced by Hyperobject Industries, Gary Sanchez Productions, TSG Entertainment
Released November 18, 2022

There exists an intermittent but very real phenomenon of movie critics, mostly male but some female, revealing—sometimes inadvertently and sometimes unabashedly—that they are deeply in love with the actresses they write about. It is always actresses, for some reason, at least in the manifestations I have seen.

Examples would be the one well-known TV guy who kept praising one lady as the most fascinating actress of her generation until his partner finally demanded, “Can you name even one memorable movie she’s been in?”; the guy who breathlessly said of one James Bond co-star that she was “the single most beautiful woman ever to enter the Bond universe,” and the well-known female critic who was famous for regularly slathering various actresses in passionate metaphors for pulchritude. (She fell in love frequently, that one.) As a friend of mine pointed out, while we were watching TV together and chuckling in the immediate aftermath of one particular guy praising the star of one recent film in worshipful tones you would expect from a thirteen-year-old boy, “Wow. That says more about him than it does about the movie.”

It certainly does.

Okay?

All of this is noted because I confess that unless I watch myself carefully today I will reveal myself that way, with Anya Taylor-Joy, star of, among other things, The Queen’s Gambit, The Northman, Last Night in Soho, and the work under consideration today.

You have no idea. It would be unseemly. People would talk.

But having gotten this out of the way by isolating it in its own opening paragraphs, I address The Menu (2022), directed by one Mike Mylod from a screenplay by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy. In it, we are introduced to Margot (Joy), a last-minute addition to the guest list at an exclusive fine-dining restaurant named Hawthorn, critically situated on an island only accessible (and escapable) via ferry; a place of the sort where all is presentation and where it is possible to eat all night and still be hungry. The chef is Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), who lords over a small platoon of acolytes who shout, “Yes, Chef!” at his every utterance, and who presents his multi-course, $1,250 per person dinner as a narrative, not an exercise in the service of foods his guests might actually like. The pretension is thick on the ground, on both sides of the equation, and Margot’s date, Tyler (Nicholas Hoult)—a guy she doesn’t like very much but is with for reasons the audience will eventually get—is a secondary source of it, bringing her largely because he wants a captive audience for his own pearls of sophistication. Just before boarding the ferry he scolds her for lighting a cigarette, because she should not have a numbed palate, and this fury of condescension is a fine preview of what she can expect in his company.

The meal is, for much of the first half of the film, an exercise in thunderous claps from Slowik, prior to the introduction of courses like a single scallop perched atop a sculpture of rocks from the shoreline, and a bread course without bread, all accompanied by speeches from the great man that swiftly turn into greater and more overt expressions of contempt for his wealthy clientele and for the beneficiaries of economic equality in general. At least one of his speeches has to do with global hunger.

And why wouldn’t Slowik feel contempt? Not only will they take anything he serves and pronounce it genius, but many of them are more interested in what their attendance says about them than about the frustrated—and it turns out, deranged—artist at their center. The table of tech-bros are largely only interested in inflating their egos with their own extravagance. The food critic is mostly interested in workshopping adjectives she can later use when she writes about this meal. The older couple has been there twelve times, but upon being questioned cannot name a single dish they consumed on their last visit. The actor is there to serve his own celebrity with a new cooking show. Even Tyler, who proudly describes himself as a foodie, is mostly interested in the sound of his own voice, fulminating for the unwilling recipient Margot. Slowik is in the position of an artist whose art only works if he has a rich clientele, but the clientele is vapid, the clientele is self-flattering, the clientele is privileged and obnoxious, and he has been driven to boredom from what must have once been a considerable passion. No wonder that he announces halfway through the meal, in the aftermath of bloodshed, that tonight’s theme is death and that everyone, diners and chefs alike, will soon die.

I have seen some online complaints that the movie takes too long to get going (that popular criticism among idiots only capable of understanding mayhem) and that the lead-up to the carnage is slow-moving. I think these people are funny analogues for the pretentious diners of the film, in that they appreciate none of the artistry and would really only be satisfied with filmed horror of the sort where people die in regular fifteen-minute intervals, and cannot process the satirical stuff that comes before, mistaking nuance for tedium. A particular joy of the film—if you will accept a pun unintended until the moment I typed it—is Anya Taylor-Joy’s Margot, whose incredulous looks and reality-check commentary establish early on that this is not her world and that she sees through it. Tyler is throughout desperate to be accepted by Slowik as an equal, and he at one point worries through tears that the great man doesn’t like him; she replies that it doesn’t matter if Slowik likes him. Nor does she understand why it is so unspeakable to Tyler that she declines those courses she doesn’t want. Similarly, every line of dialogue by the various diners exposes them as vacuous in cutting ways, and every one depicts, long before the first drop of blood is spilled, just why Slowik’s art has turned to all-out annihilation. There is precious little in this room, as depicted, that does not deserve loathing. This is satirical horror of the sort that would be a dirge if it tipped too much away from the satire and toward the horror. To continue the fine-dining metaphor, I believe that the ingredients are mixed to a delicate perfection, and that is why this movie will be entering my permanent collection, once physical media is available.

Two smaller points: I will report one great exchange, taking place late in the film when one diner, Felicity (Aimee Carrero), protests that she doesn’t really belong with these people and should be set free.

Slowik: Where did you go to school?

Felicity: Brown.

Slowik: Student Loans?

Felicity: [Miserably] No.

Slowik: You’re going to die tonight.

That is great.

And secondly: I happily report that this movie climaxes with the single greatest way of getting away from a movie’s homicidal psychopath in decades. I am willing to concede that some, over the years, might have been as good. None have been better. I mean, this is awe-inspiring, delightful genius, that puts a beautiful cap on everything the film is about. Honestly, I think Margot beats the hell out of Laurie Strode.

• • • •

The Menu ironically ate this column and so I reluctantly dispose of two originally-planned offerings in a line or two apiece. First, I note that the Netflix anthology series Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities is an uneven though compelling collection of horror tales, director-centric and in most cases worth a look; second, I note that Jeff Strand’s collection Freaky Briefs: 75 Short Absurdities is a frequently hilarious assortment of stories that revel in their own dark silliness. Do not binge, but rather sample. Trust me.