If you’ve slept on The Menu until now, it’s probably because, like everyone else, you assumed it was a typical cannibalism horror comedy. The marketing team presumably avoided the low-hanging fruit of selling it with the phrase “eat the rich” specifically in an attempt to avoid misleading people on just this front. Without giving too much away (The Menu rounds out a fantastic year of horror films that fall squarely into the category of “the less you know going in, the better”), this film is not about cannibalism. It’s far, far more interesting than that.
Using a preposterously high-end restaurant as its in-point, The Menu is a genuinely hilarious send-up of everything in the world of art, from those who create to those who consume. While this isn’t unique subject matter, the way that the plot unfolds is.
It helps that everything about the film is constructed with the same degree of care and attention you’d find in a Michelin star dish. The cinematography is far better than it almost has any right to be, and the writing has a surprising amount of depth to it. There are numerous points where utterly insane, villainous characters speak with such eloquence and poetry that you almost start to side with them before realising that you’re being taken in by their pretension and are just as much a part of the satire as anything else. And rounding all of this out is the cast.
Anya Taylor-Joy can seemingly do no wrong at the moment. The Menu does nothing to change that. Ralph Fiennes, the restaurant’s chef, is his typical, wonderful self, imbuing his role with a great deal of nuance and subtlety while still playing the horror and the comedy up whenever the film calls on him to do so. Nicholas Hoult gives a terrifically funny performance, rounding out a brilliant cast of diners.
And it really can’t be overstated how funny The Menu is. While it’s a horror film first and foremost, it might well be the funniest theatrically released film of 2022. A handful of moments seem almost guaranteed to elicit belly laughs based on the cinema-viewing audiences we’ve experienced.
Expertly juggling numerous, disparate ingredients in tandem, The Menu is a truly delicious concoction of a film.
THE MENU is in select cinemas and streaming on Disney+
