The Menu
A brilliant satire as hilarious as it is sharp
Directed By: Mark Mylod
Other Notable Films From Mylod: Mainly this one, but also he was an executive producer and director on Succession, one of the greatest TV shows of all time
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicholas Hoult, John Leguizamo
Screenplay By: Seth Reiss
Movie Synopsis: Madness transpires when a small group dines at an ultra-exclusive island restaurant.
Signature Line: “Yes, Chef!”
THE INTRODUCTION
An accounting of time, and people, and context
We all arrive at comfort differently.
Larami, for example, finds comfort in exercising. Through whatever alchemy it is that happens in her brain, she’s able to pull away from the material world and plug herself into the universe by swinging a kettlebell around or pushing a weighted sled through a parking lot. It’s a thing I admire about her, and respect about her. Because I, as it were, find comfort in Taco Bell.
That’s why asking somebody to list a few of their Comfort Movies is so interesting to me. Because despite the fact that we’re all looking to service the same basic emotional need, everyone’s criteria for determining what is or isn’t a Comfort Movie is different. For me, there are six separate boxes that need to be checked off. A movie that wants to be a Comfort Movie must…
…be pretty to look at. I most often find myself watching my Comfort Movies at night. That being the case, I need for it to have warm lighting, a steady camera, and a pleasing color palette. (You know what’s a very pretty movie? Hannibal. There’s a bunch of gruesome stuff in it, to be sure, but it looks beautiful.)
…be at least a little funny. Mind you, it doesn’t have to be a comedy. And in fact, it’s almost better if the humor isn’t coming from a straightforward joke, but instead from peculiar line deliveries, or subtle looks someone throws at another character, or even small gestures a person makes. (The Nice Guys is an excellent example here. Not one single character ever tries to sell a joke to the audience.)
…have a soothing score. It can’t be anything too chaotic, or too propulsive, or too jittery. It has to be mellow, but also interesting enough that you’d wanna listen to it on its own. (I have probably listened to the soundtrack for The Social Network more times by this point than I’ve watched The Social Network.)
…make me feel better about the world. Curiously, this doesn’t mean that it needs to be a “feel-good” movie. It just needs to activate something inside me that isn’t dread or terror. (The Banshees of Inisherin is a good example of this. It’s a decidedly sad movie, but for some reason it makes me happy. I suspect it might be the big sweaters.)
…feature an inspired performance from at least one actor I love. (Jim Carrey’s performance in The Truman Show made it an immediate Comfort Movie for me.) And lastly, it must…
…be smartly written and smartly directed, allowing me access to a world I otherwise would’ve never known. I never cared one single percent about poker before watching Rounders in the fall of 2001, but afterward I felt like I needed to drop out of college and become a professional card player.
The Menu, a dark comedy about a chef who devises an unforgettable night for an ill-fated group of guests, checks off every single one of those boxes.
It’s beautiful (director Mark Mylod and cinematographer Peter Deming settle into an artistic, captivating visual palette). And it’s hilarious (arguably the funniest movie of 2022). It’s got an elegant score (courtesy of Colin Stetson) and manages to be oddly inspiring despite its dark themes. And its central character is powered to unforgettability behind a mesmerizing Ralph Fiennes performance. Time and time again, The Menu proves itself to be, pardon the pun, of the utmost taste.
That’s why it’s a Comfort Movie of mine, and also why it’s one of the ten most rewatchables movies of the past t five years.
THE VIEWING
A timestamped rewatch of The Menu
1:01: Nicholas Hoult is here. He plays Tyler, an obnoxiously eager foodie with a secret. I am extremely high on Hoult. In addition to him having one of the 20 best faces in the world, I think he’s also one of the 20 best actors in the world. I loved him as Nux in Mad Max: Fury Road,1 as a British statesman in The Favourite,2 as the leader of a white supremacist group in The Order (or, as I’ve taken to calling it, “Sicario for white people”), and as the leading man in Juror #2.3 And guess what: I love him in this, too.
1:18: Anya Taylor-Joy is here. She plays Margot, Tyler’s date for the evening. (The two are part of a small group going to dinner at an ultra-exclusive restaurant located on a remote island.) Same as with Hoult, I greatly enjoy Taylor-Joy’s work. (I bought in on her after her performance in 2016’s Split, which was outstanding.) I thought she was gonna explode into stardom when she landed the starring role in Furiosa, but so far her biggest role has been Beth Harmon, the chess prodigy at the center of Netflix’s brilliant limited series The Queen’s Gambit.
1:19: P.S. The only movie of Taylor-Joy’s I haven’t seen is her debut feature, The Witch, a folk horror film about a Puritan family in the 1600s. I considered watching it as part of the research for this essay but decided not to after reading its Wikipedia page, because what the fuck do you mean an evil goat talks to people and a little boy vomits up a whole apple???
2:53: John Leguizamo is here. He plays George Diaz, a past-his-prime actor with an assistant leaving to take a new job soon. Leguizamo is one of my favorite performers ever. I think he’s cool, and I think he’s smart, and I think he’s talented, and I think he’s funny. I’ve been rooting for him for literal decades. So much so, that I felt a genuine joy in my heart when it was announced that Christopher Nolan—the biggest, most popular, most revered director of the past two decades—cast him in The Odyssey. I’ve got my fingers EXTREMELY CROSSED that his part in that ends up being something like Robert Downey Jr.’s in Oppenheimer. It’s time for the Leguizamossance.
3:55: Part of the fun of The Menu is that, at various points, we get zoomed-in glamour shots of extremely fancy foods. Here’s the first one. It’s “a raw local oyster in a mignonette emulsion with lemon caviar and an oyster leaf,” whatever the fuck that is.
5:05: The most unbelievable part of this movie—one in which a chef convinces two dozen people to cook themselves alive in the name of purity and idealism—is the backstory that Tyler didn’t get to go to prom because none of the girls he asked said yes. Larry King, who looks like he just missed out on the lead role in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, has been married eight separate times, but I’m supposed to believe that a guy who’s 6-foot-3 and looks like a walking Calvin Klein ad couldn’t find someone to go out on a date with him?
5:17: Hong Chau is here. She plays Elsa, the maitre d’hotel at Hawthorn (the ultra-exclusive restaurant). I’d seen Chau in Downsizing before, and she’s great in that, but this was really the movie that made me be like, “Okay, I’m in on whatever she’s doing.” As much as I love the three actors I mentioned before this, hers is the name I said first after The Menu was over.
7:32: See the guy on the right? He’s skipping a rock across the water as Elsa gives the diners a tour of the island. No man in the history of the planet has ever been able to walk past a body of water without trying to skip a rock across it. I guarantee you before George Washington crossed the Delaware River in 1776, he picked up a rock, turned to Alexander Hamilton or whoever, said “Aye, check this out, bro,” then skipped that bitch across the water. I would bet my life on it.
8:14: Right around here—when Elsa shows the group where the kitchen staff lives, which is a literal bunker that only contains beds, two toilets, two showers, and some lockers—is where everyone’s antennas should’ve started to go up. I mean, THEY GOT FUCKING OPEN-AIR PRISON TOILETS:
OBVIOUSLY EVERYONE WHO WORKS HERE IS CRAZY.
12:06: Ralph Fiennes is here. He plays Julian Slowik, a world-renowned chef who has become disillusioned with his own success. I love the fact that Fiennes—a top level performer with a truly unimpeachable acting pedigree (Schindler’s List! Quiz Show! The English Patient! Conclave!)—still signs up to do stuff like The Menu, Red Dragon, and 28 Years Later.
12:07: P.S. Blasphemous as this may be to say, I think this might be my favorite ever Fiennes performance. It’s just such a wonderful use of his gravitas and intensity. He’s perfect in this.
12:36: The second food spotlight we get. This one is “a compressed and pickled cucumber melon, milk snow, and charred lace,” whatever the fuck that is. (The way that I know I’m low class is the first time I saw these my initial thought was, “I didn’t know they made Skittles in that color.”)
13:17: I accidentally breezed past the other people who are attending the dinner tonight because I was so excited about the Hoult-Anya-Leguizamo trio. Let’s very quickly hit the others. There’s:
