Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Menu’ on Hulu, a Slashy Satire Starring Ralph Fiennes as a Sociopathic Chef Serving Up Seven-Course Horror

Haute-cuisine culture (and a few other things) get sliced, diced, fricasseed, masticated and swallowed in The Menu (now on HBO Max), and I promise that’s the last hacky food metaphor you’ll read in this review. Mark Mylod, an executive producer and director for Succession, helms this tar-black comedy starring Ralph Fiennes as a chef so high-end, he can get away with serving sociopathy as his main course, and Anya Taylor-Joy as seemingly the only diner among his uber-exclusive clientele unwilling to chow down. Sounds (looks up alternatives to the word “delicious”) compelling, doesn’t it?

THE MENU: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “What are we eating, a Rolex?” Margot (Taylor-Joy) says incredulously. She doesn’t quite comprehend the gravity of the situation, accompanying Tyler (Nicolas Hoult) on a very expensive upper-crust eating excursion. And we do mean excursion – a handful of patrons of the edible arts coughs up who knows how much dough to get on a boat to an island populated only by chef Julian Slowik (Fiennes) and his staff, who harvest the local flora and fauna for their posh-as-eff dining experience. You know the kind, where the chef considers his food to be art on par with Picasso, and implores that one not “eat” but “taste” and “savor” and etc. the food, and introduces courses with anecdotes, insight and self-aggrandizement followed by the serving of a quarter-ounce of foam or a miniscule dripping of liquid on a leaf. Margot will have none of it. “Please don’t say ‘mouthfeel,’” she says. “We have reached the base camp of Mt. Bullshit,” she says. We like Margot.

The dining group consists of several assholes: A haughty food critic (Janet McTeer) and her enabling editor (Paul Adelstein), a famous washed-up actor (John Leguizamo) and his assistant (Aimee Carrero), three wiseass tech bros (Arturo Castro, Mark St. Cyr, Rob Yang), and a snobby pair of frequent Slowik patrons (Judith Light and Reed Birney). Tyler is especially annoying, because he’s the one who says “mouthfeel,” and is a wannabe and a mansplainer, although he’s as eminently punchable as anyone else in this crew. What the devil is no-nonsense Margot doing with him? It is a mystery. She hangs in there though, sipping wine and maintaining a skeptical eye. There are two other notable characters here. Chef Slowik’s mother (Rebecca Koon), quietly drunk over there in the corner. And Elsa (Hong Chang), the maitre’d and Chef Slowik’s chief enabler, and because she knows what goes on here and is entirely complicit with it, she carries herself cold and steely like Dracula’s butler.

You won’t be shocked to learn that Chef Slowik is actually a maniac, since we’ve seen that look on Fiennes face before; it’s very In Bruges, very Voldemortian. He claps his hands harshly to silence a room and his kitchen minions respond just this side of a sieg heil. We’ve got ourselves a real cult of personality here. And the vibe is very there-will-be-blood. But whose? Margot doesn’t really deserve it, although she raises Chef’s ire by refusing to eat the bread course, which of course arrives with no bread, and just a few micro-squidges of sauce on a plate. But the rest of these chodes? I dunno if they deserve it this bad, but they’re gonna get it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Triangle of Sadness (nasty!) and Flux Gourmet (fetishy!) took similar aim at easy targets, albeit more, shall we say, gastrointestinally corporeal. Pig housed similar criticisms of culinary snobbery. But The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover got there first.

Performance Worth Watching: This isn’t quite the Fiennes/Taylor-Joy showdown you kinda want it to be, so let’s praise Hong Chau for establishing the film’s air of menace.

Memorable Dialogue: Any movie giving Fiennes dialogue like the following is always worthwhile: “It wasn’t cod, you donkey. It was halibut. Rare f—ing spotted halibut.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Beneath the surface of The Menu’s satirical ravaging of anything within the contextual fog of the word “foodie” exists the portrait of a frustrated artist who’s reached the pinnacle of his creativity, yet remains deeply unsatisfied. Perhaps this is because that pinnacle is also when the work becomes a parody of itself; or because one’s hunger – on both a base biological level or for creative progress – is never fully satiated, but merely temporarily assuaged; or because the only people who can appreciate it are shitbirds and cretins.

All that stuff quietly lurks behind Ralph Fiennes eyes, which suggest that there was a point in Chef Slowik’s recent life where he suffered an epic psychological meltdown that pushed him over the edge from egomaniacal sex-pest kitchen-creep to full-blown supervillain. It’s far more fascinating to see Ralph Fiennes infer such corruption via the tone of his line readings and vague, unspoken implications of Slowik’s backstory than to actually see him do it, which might be entertaining, but would too loudly and directly address the character’s motives. Mylod and screenwriters Seth Reiss and Will Tracy wisely let Ralph Fiennes do as Ralph Fiennes does: being nasty and funny and snakelike while also maintaining an element of mystery within his character. Slowik’s diabolical plan is amusing – and bloody and ironic and, if I were to break a promise from earlier in this review, I’d say something right here about the justified serving of desserts.

The screenplay draws a parallel between Chef Slowik and the Leguizamo character, whose professional twilight finds him essentially making capitalist compromises. “I’m in the ‘presenter’ phase of my career,” he says; he plans to pitch a food-travel reality series, and Slowik surely doesn’t take kindly to being a tool to develop a lazy actor’s palate. It leads to a great joke, but frustratingly, to little else, one of a handful of yarn strands the film could stand to tug and unfurl a little more. Beyond that, the film sets up fat lambs for the slaughter: The idle rich, amoral Silicon Valley jerks, the know-it-all critic engaging in intellectual masturbation. And of course there’s Margot, who has no use for any of this drivel. She’s our analog, the cool, sympathetic hero with the keen BS detector, the reasonable protagonist we hope we’d be among such lunatics. You can’t help but get behind the individual who rejects the lure of the cult.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Menu is thematically untidy and slightly underdeveloped in spots, rendering it merely good instead of great. Otherwise, it’s a pointedly absurd, consistently funny and suspenseful chamber-piece thriller with strong performances and a sharp edge.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.