The Menu Review

Scare Value Award Winner – Best Screenplay

The Menu review.

What pairs best with the black comedy of The Menu? As it turns out…Ralph Fiennes. Fiennes leads a great cast for a mostly locked room tale of fine dining and finer dialogue. The commentary here may be pretty basic, but it’s delivered with such bite and disdain that you’ll happily go along for the ride.

New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.

The Menu

Directed by Mark Mylod

Written by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy

Starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Fiennes, Nicholas Hoult and John Leguizamo

The Menu Review

The Menu won’t have something for everyone. It is meticulously designed for a specific palate. If you are craving pitch black comedy directed at the type of people that you cannot stand…good news…it’s designed for you.

12 people travel to a remote island to eat the food of a world-famous chef. It’s a pricey trip but the menu is to die for. When one of the guests (Nicholas Hoult) brings a different date (Anya Taylor-Joy) than originally intended it threatens to disrupt the perfectly crafted evening the staff has worked to provide.

The Menu isn’t interested in scaring you. It’s barely interested in providing suspense. Chef (Ralph Fiennes) lets us in on his plan fairly early in the proceedings. What The Menu is interested in, however, is providing its customers with as well-crafted and filling a meal as Chef does to his customers. There are the requisite twists and turns and some surprises…but these aren’t the point. The point is to provide an entertaining, and often darkly hilarious, experience.

The cost of dining at this exclusive restaurant ensures that only the wealthiest and interested foodie would apply. Chef has hand selected the consumers for this night. A food critic who put him on the map, some businessmen in the employ of his benefactor, his most loyal patrons. Some of his reasons for inviting the people he did are very pointed. Some are downright hilarious.

The menu has been designed too. Each course tells a story. Usually, a horrifying one that the aloof cliental are far too slow to pick up on. Each portion is accompanied by a list of ingredients on screen…another clever and funny way of keeping the movie entertaining.

The problem for Chef is that Margot (Taylor-Joy) doesn’t belong here. He has prepared a very specific experience for some very specific people. People who live in a world that Margot does not. His attempts to discover who Margot is are met with aggressive roadblocks. Margot isn’t interested in any of what Chef is cooking.

Fiennes is perfectly cast in The Menu. He delivers monologues and biting takedowns with the confidence of a man who understands exactly what kind of movie he is in. Even if his customers do not. He’s a clear villain…he admits as much. He’s also there to feed some commentary to his well to do customers who are no saints in their own right. His backstory (and Margot’s) is as close to a story as The Menu gets. The story, in his mind, had already been told. This is just the dessert. Perhaps more appropriately, the just desserts.

The rest of the cast is well suited for their roles. Margot has the meatiest part of the patrons. She’s thrust into a world she neither understands nor cares to be a part of. She serves as our window into the world of The Menu. Hoult is perfect as the food enthusiast who is obsessed with getting this meal. He will have you rolling your eyes at his need to show off his knowledge of everything that no normal person could possibly care about. From his first lines you understand exactly who these people are.

There are a good number of surprising moments in this movie. They’ll be left unspoiled in this The Menu review. Some of them are hilarious…some far more sinister. Almost everyone at the restaurant has a secret of some kind. Not just the people looking for a great meal.

The combination of Fiennes performance with some bitingly funny commentary is a perfect mixture for entertainment. The menu designed for the customers in the film is said to have a theme that they won’t discover until the end. The movie The Menu has a theme too…but you’ll understand it very quickly. That isn’t a mistake. It’s how you’ll know that you didn’t belong in this restaurant.

Scare Value

The Menu gets down to business pretty quickly. There’s no mystery in what Chef has designed for his patrons that evening. As the layers get peeled away all that is truly revealed is what you suspected from the start. It’s like a locked room mystery that you already know the answer to. And it’s wonderful. The Menu isn’t just funny, it’s several different types of funny. At times surprising and always engaging. It’s worth making a reservation.

4/5