The Menu Review - The Menu You Cannot Eat, But Must Savour

Mark Mylod's The Menu is not a black comedy, but here I am, warning you against it. The multistarrer drama is far from what you might call a black comedy. I want you to prepare yourself for a thrilling and quite surprising drama set on a remote island. The Menu will make you uncomfortable on many occasions with its suspense and disturbing events, but all that adds up to a fantastic cinematic experience, with all terms suiting the tag "black comedy-thriller." It serves you an unwanted dish with delicious performances and poetic storytelling, which you would hate eating but love relishing.

Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) sets a date with Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) and travels to a remote island to eat at Hawthorne, an exclusive restaurant run by celebrity chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). The two are joined by other celebrity guests as the chef prepares a lavish molecular gastronomy menu where food is treated as conceptual art. However, the cooking in this kitchen is not like that in regular restaurants. The head chef and his cooks have some shocking surprises for the wealthy guests. See all the ingredients for this dish in the film only, because I don't want to spoil anything.

I wonder where Seth Reiss and Will Tracy got this idea from. It's unusual, peculiar, and yet so interesting. The Menu consumes you as a film, but moreover, it's an allegorical seminar for food and cinema lovers. The script gets into your stomach as well as your head at the same time, leaving your tongue satisfied with unexpected swallowing. Getting too allegorical, huh? Well, that's what the film is all about. Anyway, the screenplay really follows all the characteristics of an ideal thriller. In the first 30 minutes, you have no clue about what's going to happen. Then suddenly, the twist strikes and gets more and more sour by the end. Yes, a little predictable toward the conclusion part, but that's alright. Not every dish can be out of the menu, right?

The Menu has an ensemble cast of

Ralph Fiennes, Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicholas Hoult, Hong Chau, Janet McTeer, Judith Light, John Leguizamo, and Reed Birney. Ralph as the chef is a deadly person, though, and I wouldn't reveal much about his character. Let me leave you with a hint, though: get ready for a surprise. Anya Taylor-Joy's role is not joyful, but her performance surely is. That head waiter by Hong Chau and fanboy of Slowik by Nicholas Hoult will get on your nerves. The support of Janet McTeer, Judith Light, John Leguizamo, Reed Birney, Aimee Carrero, Paul Adelstein, and Arturo Castro is simply amazing. The casting unit has shared some thrilling sequences together, with small nuances in their expressions, and even though some of them don't have dialogues sometimes, it's great teamwork.

The Menu is shot well by Peter Deming, as he tries to describe a little about the characters with his frames. Slowik claps, you see the movements behind it, and then there is a tight sound design there. You shudder for a moment, and believe me Peter, the sound designer and editor Christopher Tellefsen have won it there. A tight thriller must have a gripping background score, but The Menu is a little loose there. The dialogued are pretty ordinary and doesn't help you laugh your stomach out, despite being presented as a black comedy. Or was it too black for the white screen experience? Who knows. Mark Mylod's experiment is indeed chilling and terrifying on some occasions, but misses a few ingredients. The Menu gets too tricky sometimes while exploring human nature and its excessive outbursts. You may not agree with that or feel convinced by it. However, the other side of the table is very engaging and exciting. Don't eat it; savour it. Relish it. Swallow it. Enjoy it.