The Menu is a comedy-horror-thriller set in an exclusive restaurant on a private island and it gives the rich a good kicking, like The Triangle of Sadness, except here they manage to keep their food down, mercifully. (At $1,200 a head, you’d hope so.) But the diners are not spared otherwise, and it’s nastily fun, if not pure evil, and should possibly come with a warning: after this, you will never, ever wish to dine anywhere that isn’t Nando’s.
The film is directed by Mike Mylod with a screenplay by Will Tracy and Seth Reiss. (Both Mylod and Tracy have worked on Succession.) The opening sees the group of diners waiting to take the boat over to the island where the restaurant, Hawthorne, is located. One is Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), a super-wealthy foodie and snob who has watched every episode of Chef’s Table multiple times and considers chefs true artists as ‘they play with the raw materials of life’. (Trouble is, as someone later points out, it’s ‘art that turns to shit in your gut’.) His date for tonight is Margot (the amazingly huge-eyed Anya Taylor-Joy who lights up every film she is in). She is a last-minute stand-in for the girlfriend who has just ditched him. Margot is not rich and is not part of this world. Margot would prefer oysters without foam or pearls of lemon caviar, thank you very much. (The food porn is fabulous, by the way.) Margot doesn’t understand that before you eat you must first photograph your food for Instagram. And when she finds out the cost per head, she gasps: ‘What are we eating. Rolexes?’
The island is menacing from the off, with its starkly black driftwood, the scuttling crabs, the maître d’ who may whisper cryptically in a guest’s ear: ‘You’ll eat less than you desire and more than you deserve.’
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in