A deliciously vicious satire that almost bites off more than it can chew.

The Appetizer

There is a particular kind of restaurant experience that has nothing to do with food. You know the one I mean: the kind where the menu arrives without prices, where the waiter speaks in hushed tones about the provenance of each ingredient, where the portions are microscopic and arranged on the plate with the precision of a museum installation. The kind where you leave three hours later having spent more than your monthly car payment, and you stop at a drive-through on the way home because you are still hungry. The Menu, directed by Mark Mylod from a screenplay by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, takes dead aim at this world and, for most of its runtime, hits the target with savage precision.

The premise is deceptively simple. A group of wealthy guests arrive by boat at Hawthorn, an exclusive restaurant on a remote island run by the legendary Chef Slowik, played by Ralph Fiennes with the measured intensity of a man who has been planning something terrible for a very long time. The guests include a food critic and her editor, a washed-up movie star, a trio of obnoxious tech bros, an older couple who are regulars, and Tyler, an obsessive foodie played by Nicholas Hoult, who has brought along his date, Margot, played by Anya Taylor-Joy. Tyler knows every detail of Chef Slowik's career. Margot does not care about any of it. She is a last-minute replacement for Tyler's ex-girlfriend, and her presence on the island was not part of the plan.

What plan, you ask? That is the question that gives The Menu its delicious tension. From the moment the guests arrive, something feels off. The staff moves with military precision. The kitchen operates in eerie unison. Chef Slowik introduces each course with a monologue that grows increasingly personal and increasingly disturbing. The food is exquisite, but each dish comes with a story, and the stories are aimed like weapons at specific guests. The breadless bread plate. The tortilla pressed with images of each guest's sins. The emulsion served alongside the revelation of embezzlement. The courses are not just food; they are accusations, and by the time the guests realize they are not going to be allowed to leave, the meal has become something far more dangerous than indigestion.

Ralph Fiennes Serves the Performance of a Lifetime

The film lives and dies on Ralph Fiennes's performance, and he delivers something magnificent. Chef Slowik is a man who has achieved everything he set out to achieve and found it all meaningless. He has cooked for presidents and billionaires. He has earned every star and every accolade. And somewhere along the way, the joy of cooking—the simple, primal pleasure of feeding people—was consumed by the machinery of exclusivity, pretension, and wealth. Fiennes plays him not as a madman but as a deeply disappointed idealist, someone whose love for his craft was so complete that its corruption has left him with nothing but a meticulously organized rage.

What makes the performance remarkable is its restraint. Fiennes never raises his voice. He never loses control. His menace comes from his stillness, from the way he pauses before delivering a devastating observation, from the way his eyes soften when he talks about the beauty of a perfectly executed dish and harden when he contemplates the people who have reduced that beauty to a status symbol. There is a moment early in the film where Slowik watches Tyler photograph a course from multiple angles before eating it, and the expression on Fiennes's face—a mixture of contempt, sadness, and recognition—tells you everything you need to know about what is coming.

The supporting cast is uniformly excellent. Nicholas Hoult captures Tyler's particular brand of insufferable foodie culture with uncomfortable accuracy—the man who knows everything about food except how to enjoy it. Hong Chau, as Slowik's matre d' Elsa, is a revelation: ice-cold, terrifyingly composed, and capable of conveying menace with nothing more than a slight tilt of her head. John Leguizamo is perfectly cast as the fading movie star, and Judith Light brings a quiet devastation to the role of a woman who has been dining at Hawthorn for years and has finally been forced to confront what her loyalty has cost her.

The Margot Problem

And then there is Anya Taylor-Joy, who is tasked with being the audience surrogate, the person who sees through the pretension and calls it what it is. She is good in the role—Taylor-Joy has a natural screen presence that makes her watchable in virtually anything—but the script does not give her enough to work with in the film's first half. Margot is defined primarily by her refusal to be impressed, which is satisfying as a counterpoint to the other guests' fawning but does not constitute a fully realized character. She smokes. She rolls her eyes. She asks for a cheeseburger. These are entertaining beats, but they are beats, not a character arc.

The film improves significantly in its handling of Margot once the stakes escalate. Her confrontation with Slowik in his private quarters is the film's best scene, a two-hander between Taylor-Joy and Fiennes that crackles with intelligence and mutual recognition. Slowik sees in Margot something he lost: an honest relationship with pleasure, unsullied by pretension or performance. Margot sees in Slowik something she recognizes: a service worker whose dedication has been exploited by people who do not deserve it. Their exchange reframes the entire film, transforming it from a satire of foodie culture into something more universal—a meditation on the way capitalism devours the things we love.

But the film takes too long to get there. The middle section, while consistently entertaining, relies too heavily on the structure of the meal itself, each course serving as a vignette that exposes another guest's hypocrisy. The pattern is effective at first but becomes predictable: course arrives, Slowik monologues, revelation drops, guests panic, order is restored by the staff. By the fourth or fifth iteration, you can feel the screenplay's mechanics grinding, and the film's satirical edge dulls slightly through repetition. A tighter edit—perhaps one fewer course, one fewer revelation—would have maintained the tension more effectively.

Satire and Its Limits

The Menu is at its sharpest when it targets the ecosystem around fine dining rather than fine dining itself. The tech bros who treat everything as an investment opportunity. The critic who wields her influence like a cudgel. The celebrity who trades on his fame for free meals. The loyal patrons who have confused spending money with having taste. These are recognizable types rendered with enough specificity to feel like real people, and the film's willingness to show that they are all complicit in the system that has driven Slowik to extremes gives the satire genuine moral complexity.

Where the film stumbles is in its broader ambitions. It wants to say something about the relationship between art and commerce, about the way that wealth distorts value, about the cost of perfection. These are worthy themes, but the film addresses them with a bluntness that occasionally undermines its own intelligence. Slowik's monologues, while beautifully delivered, sometimes veer into thesis statements that tell us what to think rather than letting us arrive at conclusions ourselves. The symbolism of the final course—I will not spoil it here, but it involves a childhood memory and a very specific dessert—is effective on a visceral level but somewhat on-the-nose as a thematic resolution.

The film also struggles with tone, particularly in its final act. The horror elements, which have been simmering throughout, boil over into sequences that are genuinely disturbing, and the shift from dark comedy to something approaching genuine terror is not always smooth. There are moments where the film seems unsure whether it wants us to laugh or recoil, and this tonal uncertainty saps some of the power from its climax. The ending, while satisfying in the moment, raises logical questions that the film is not particularly interested in answering, choosing instead to prioritize emotional catharsis over narrative coherence.

The Craft Behind the Curtain

Technically, the film is superb. The cinematography captures both the beauty of the food and the claustrophobia of the setting with equal skill. The production design of Hawthorn itself is a triumph: a minimalist temple to gastronomy that feels both aspirational and oppressive, all clean lines and natural materials and carefully controlled lighting. The sound design is particularly noteworthy—the clink of cutlery, the sizzle of a pan, the synchronized clap of the kitchen staff acknowledging each course—creating an ASMR-like atmosphere that makes the eventual eruptions of violence all the more jarring.

Mark Mylod, known primarily for his television work on Succession and Game of Thrones, brings a televisual sensibility to the film that is both a strength and a limitation. He excels at ensemble dynamics, at the subtle power plays and social hierarchies that emerge when wealthy people are confined together. He is less confident with the film's more cinematic moments—the wider shots, the more operatic gestures—which occasionally feel like a television director stretching beyond his comfort zone. This is a minor criticism, and one that many viewers will not notice, but there are moments where The Menu feels like an excellent episode of a prestige TV show rather than a fully realized film.

The food itself, prepared by food consultant Dominique Crenn, is gorgeous and serves as a character in its own right. Each dish is designed to be both beautiful and unsettling, reflecting Slowik's state of mind as the evening progresses. The early courses are pristine and controlled; the later ones become increasingly unhinged, incorporating elements that are provocative, confrontational, and ultimately destructive. The progression of the food mirrors the progression of the narrative, and it is a testament to the filmmakers' attention to detail that the menu feels as carefully constructed as any other element of the production.

What It All Means

At its core, The Menu is a film about the death of joy. Chef Slowik loved cooking. His guests once loved eating. Somewhere along the line, both the creation and consumption of food became performances—things done for status, for content, for the approval of others rather than for the fundamental pleasure they provide. Margot, with her cheeseburger request, represents the possibility of return—the idea that it is not too late to strip away the pretension and remember why we eat in the first place. It is a hopeful message delivered in a deeply cynical package, and the tension between those two impulses gives the film much of its energy.

The film is also, whether intentionally or not, a commentary on the creative process itself. Slowik is an artist who has lost his connection to his art, who has become so consumed by the expectations of his audience that he can no longer create for the sake of creation. Every artist, every creator, will recognize something of themselves in his dilemma: the moment when the thing you love becomes a job, when external validation replaces internal satisfaction, when you realize that the people consuming your work do not understand it and never will. The Menu does not offer a solution to this dilemma, but it articulates it with a clarity that is both painful and cathartic.

Ultimately, The Menu is a very good film that falls just short of greatness. Its performances are excellent, its satire is mostly sharp, and its central metaphor is rich enough to sustain repeated viewing. But its structure is too rigid, its tonal shifts too abrupt, and its thematic conclusions too tidy for a film that spends most of its runtime reveling in moral ambiguity. It is a meal that begins with extraordinary promise and ends with a course that is slightly less satisfying than what came before. Still, in a landscape cluttered with franchise entries and legacy sequels, a film that aims this high and misses by this little is worth celebrating. I would recommend it enthusiastically, with the caveat that you may want to eat before you go.