I said I wanted to see The Menu. I really wanted to see The Menu. The weekend it came out, I was in something of a downer mood and didn’t go to see much of anything. The weekend after I spent almost the entire extended Thanksgiving weekend grading a pile of student papers. So, finally, I got to see The Menu, and…OK, one small problem. I did a Google search to see if there was a post-credits scene, and the first result actually detailed the end of the movie before it got to whether or not there was a post-credits scene. Like, just say if there is one or not, top result on a Google search! You don’t need to explain the significance of such a scene or not!
Normally I don’t mind spoilers so much, but this time it bugged me. So, if you have gotten this far and don’t know if there’s a post credits scene: no there isn’t, and that’s all I will say about the end of the movie for the rest of the review.
Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) is just an unassuming young woman going to an exclusive, high class restaurant with her date, aspiring foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult). The restaurant in question, Hawthrone, is located on an island off the coast, and the only way to get there and back is to take a small boat. As it is, Hawthorne only caters to 12 customers a night, and the cost of attending is rather high, so it really is the sort of restaurant that only the rich can afford to eat at. Once on the island, it turns out that Margot was not really supposed to be there: Tyler had made the reservations for a different woman. As it is, the rest of the customers for the night all seem to be varying degrees of awful, including Tyler, who comes across as an absolute food snob who seems to be starstruck by Hawthorne’s head chef.
As it is, Hawthorne produces pretty much everything that they serve to their guests, and the entire staff lives on the island under the exacting eye of said head chef, Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), except Margot quickly gets the idea that something is off about the night. While Slowik introduces each coarse with a speech to describe the artistic point of each coarse, Margot seems to be the only one who notices there’s an edge to each bit, possibly because she may be the only person there paying the right amount of attention. Considering the rest of the guests include frequent rich customers, some finance guys who work for the man who owns the restaurant, a washed up actor and his assistant, and a restaurant critic and her editor, that may not be that surprising until it is too late. And from there, Margot may have to use the wits she alone seems to possess to get out of Hawthorne alive.
Well, this was a blast. Combining both horror with sharp satire, the movie is basically about the artist, his medium, and how much that medium might be appreciated by consumers. Slowik, early on, asks his patrons to, in his words, “not eat” the meal he serves. But likewise, he is very much a man who lost his passion for his work. Meanwhile, Margot is something of an enigma to him, and she’s holding something back. Why, exactly, is she there? Slowik wants to know, and Margot isn’t exactly telling him. The whole menu is thrown off if even anything is out of place, and Margot is that one thing out of place. Meanwhile, even as things get more and more intense, Tyler sits there obliviously the whole time, seeming to enjoy the experience even as things start to get bloody. There are no bad performances, but Taylor-Joy and Fiennes are both in especially fine form here as they generally always are, and Hoult makes a nice counterpoint to, oh, everything that’s going on.
Now, I said above the ending of the movie, and its big reveal, were spoiled for me while I was checking an article online to find out if there was a post-credits scene or not. 90% of the time, AMC’s own app tells me if there is one or not. It didn’t this time, and I did a look around and learned more than I wanted to. In this case, I will say that the knowledge allowed me to see lines and moments with a meaning that is probably meant to allow the movie to hold up to multiple viewings, something some movies do very well (Usual Suspects comes to mind), where a moment will mean one thing if you know how the movie ends but something else if you don’t. I would have greatly appreciated not knowing in this case, and I say that as someone who often doesn’t mind spoilers. There are a lot of moments where I might have enjoyed realizing what things meant had I not known, and so, it did somewhat affect my enjoyment of the film. Suffice to say, I will be more careful about that sort of thing in the future.
Grade: B+
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