The Menu review – Dark satire made smashed burger style

The ultra-rich, powerful and privileged get their just desserts. That seems to be the flavour of the moment when it comes to dark comedies, particularly when you look at three recent servings: the Oscar-nominated Triangle of Sadness, fellow nominee Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, and sharp, satirical horror tale The Menu.

The Menu enjoyed a limited cinema release back in November. However, thanks to its arrival on Disney+ earlier this month, at least in South Africa, many more people have the opportunity to taste test its distinctly tart flavour profile for themselves.

I’ll try to dial back the food puns now.

In The Menu, 12 patrons pay thousands of dollars for one of the most exclusive fine dining experiences in the world: a six-course dinner at Hawthorn, a remote island restaurant owned and operated by celebrity chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). The guests are a diverse lot – recognisable names and faces in the cast include Janet McTeer, John Leguizamo and Judith Light – but an outlier in their number is Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), who is only there because of her obsessive foodie date Tyler (Nicholas Hoult). Normally, this wouldn’t matter, but Margot’s presence isn’t part of Slowik’s special, meticulously prepared menu for the evening, which is full of shocking surprises.

As a movie, The Menu makes sure to include many top-quality ingredients. With Succession and Shameless’s Mark Mylod in the director’s chair, performances are strong, and it’s Fiennes, and Hong Chau as Hawthorn maître d’ Elsa, who stand out in particular. Their intense menace is heightened by the perennially composed customer service masks that they wear. The film is also sprinkled with memorable, laugh-out-loud dialogue that parodies obnoxious foodie culture, and occasionally slices down to the medium-rare meat of why it means so much to so many people, even if they can’t necessarily explain it themselves.

The problem is that The Menu too swiftly becomes messy – and not in an artful-smear-of-beetroot-puree-on-a-plate kind of way. Though it manages to refocus at times, the effect becomes more like scrunching up a fistful of mincemeat and slamming it on a grill. Satire gives way to straight-up horror, which is less interesting, and makes the collective of awful patrons (barring Margot) less entertaining as their primary requirement from this point is simply to act afraid. Even worse, the cutting commentary becomes obvious, with Slowik spelling everything out for the audience instead of trusting them to make their own connections.

The Menu has a lot to say about how creation to please others can sap happiness from your art and life – a particularly relevant topic in the era of social media validation and endless pursuit of views – but the delivery of this message is too on the nose. It’s delivered with the bluntness of a tenderizer mallet.

The cherry on top is that The Menu has a complicated relationship with critique. The film wants you to think, to dig in, but given the way it invites the audience to jeer at McTeer’s pretentious food critic and her sycophantic editor (Paul Adelstein), it’s also criticising you for attempting deeper analysis. It just doesn’t seem possible to have it both ways, encouraging viewers to engage cerebrally but also just to sit back, consume and enjoy the movie for what it is.

You can enjoy both haute cuisine and a greasy cheeseburger, but these two schools of food don’t mash together very well on the same plate. In trying to sit in this odd hybrid space, it means The Menu is tasty but ultimately not satisfying or filling.

Consume The Menu now on Disney+.