The Menu(2022) Review

One could say that a briefly touched theme in “ The Menu” is about the necessity for showing off or whats called in cinephile terms “pretentiousness”. A subject of that is the lead character Margot’s boyfriend Tyler. Let us not reveal more to prevent spoiling the film, which is in one word: atmospheric. The narrative follows Margot, played by Anya Taylor Joy, who with her “foodie” boyfriend Tyler goes to Hotel Hawthorn, with a couple of other “esteemed” class of people to experience Chef Julien Slowik’s, a phenomenal Ralph Fiennes, world famous menu, only for the day to turn into a nightmare.

It’s a brilliant film really.

Julien Slowik is not a man you understand at first. There is a great amount of aura built around him, and it really affect you itself, whether he is staring at someone or when he walks menacingly at someone. Ralph Fiennes is brilliant in this role as a subtle but intense man who hides a great deal of pain in his soul, for his art. Watch him in the scene where he makes a “real” cheeseburger for Margot. That one scene is poignantly beautiful to show his yearning for his art.

Anya Taylor as Margot, is quite good as a character who is pretty much an audience stand in, considering she arrives as a replacement for Tyler’s previous date. The writing ,however, uses this simple information to good effect, to bring out the selfish nature of Tyler and his food liking.

And speaking of writing, the film is an absolutely brilliant satire at the state of cinema or any industry currently. How pseudo “passionists” like Tyler or art critics like Lillian Bloom, or just regular people like us who:

· Obsess over something without knowing the basics of how to do it

· Intellectuals who have forgotten the how to just love the art; only looking through its technicalities

· have forgotten to respect the effort that goes behind making a piece of art and mindlessly consume it to bump up our social prestige.

Especially, the character of Lillian Bloom, a food critic and her male worker, who is basically a sycophant, who are predominantly shown to be talking “high art” stuff about food that just goes over our head. It shows to us about how people are more interested in promoting themselves through their art rather than like the art itself. The exact opposite is revealed to be Tyler who, even as the situations go borderline crazy, enjoys the “events” taking place without any love, gorging onto the food even as it contains a bone marrow of a human, which is part of the act. It really brings out the reality in all the guests and forces themselves to look at themselves. The acting, music, cinematography, editing and especially the sound design just all unite to give us a brilliant satire on the issue of art in the modern world. Leave all this artsy themes and what have you is basically a fun, darkly humorous film that is as tense as it is funny and scary.