Post by Dracula on Dec 7, 2022 10:56:32 GMT -5
The Menu(12/4/2022)
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of The Menu pre-release. The trailers more or less made it look like a mainstream horror movie, albeit one with a tinge of a post-Get Out social commentary. But I’m not sure “horror movie” is really the right term for this. It’s not really trying to scare its audience or even really be much in the way of tense suspense. I’d maybe call it more of a satire, but it’s also not really trying to be laugh out loud funny, though perhaps senses of humor vary. And despite the difficulties in classifying it, this is hardly some kind of mold busting experimental work, on the contrary, it’s pretty straightforwardly understandable. The film revolves around a dinner service at an extremely high end restaurant located on an island that the customers are ferried to, but this is no ordinary dinner, rather it’s a trap that the chef (played by Ralph Fiennes) has set in order to lure in and get revenge on his enemies over the course of a night. So, it’s kind of like a riff on Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None” but without any pretense of being a mystery as the responsible party is apparent from the start.
Of course, all of this is rooted in a sort of extreme exaggeration of “foodie” culture, in ways that seem pretty authentic from where I sit but I’m quite the outsider to all of this. I’ve never eaten at a restaurant anywhere near as fancy as the one in the movie and for that matter rarely go to overly nice restaurants at all so any recognition I have of all this stuff is basically third hand. In addition to not loving food enough to be enticed by some of the food things that go on here I also kind of don’t really care enough to be angered by a number of the things this movie is raging against and very few of the things that the evil central chef is angry about really strike me as offenses worthy of violent retribution. And if looked at more as a statement about capitalism writ large I still find the message here pretty muddled. The rich customers here are dicks, but the chef raging against them strikes me as plainly a bigger dick so this could just as easily be seen as a vilification of anti-capitalism as capitalism. So, as a social satire I find this muddled but I did enjoy myself just the same. Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy are both very strong here as is much of the rest of the cast and the production design of the restaurant is quite effective. The movie kept me interested the whole time, though I must say it maybe shows its hand pretty early and has trouble escalating the tension in its second half and doesn’t really deliver on any stunning revelation at the end. As a neat little genre exercise you can do worse but the film itself never really elevated past that for me.
*** out of Five
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of The Menu pre-release. The trailers more or less made it look like a mainstream horror movie, albeit one with a tinge of a post-Get Out social commentary. But I’m not sure “horror movie” is really the right term for this. It’s not really trying to scare its audience or even really be much in the way of tense suspense. I’d maybe call it more of a satire, but it’s also not really trying to be laugh out loud funny, though perhaps senses of humor vary. And despite the difficulties in classifying it, this is hardly some kind of mold busting experimental work, on the contrary, it’s pretty straightforwardly understandable. The film revolves around a dinner service at an extremely high end restaurant located on an island that the customers are ferried to, but this is no ordinary dinner, rather it’s a trap that the chef (played by Ralph Fiennes) has set in order to lure in and get revenge on his enemies over the course of a night. So, it’s kind of like a riff on Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None” but without any pretense of being a mystery as the responsible party is apparent from the start.
Of course, all of this is rooted in a sort of extreme exaggeration of “foodie” culture, in ways that seem pretty authentic from where I sit but I’m quite the outsider to all of this. I’ve never eaten at a restaurant anywhere near as fancy as the one in the movie and for that matter rarely go to overly nice restaurants at all so any recognition I have of all this stuff is basically third hand. In addition to not loving food enough to be enticed by some of the food things that go on here I also kind of don’t really care enough to be angered by a number of the things this movie is raging against and very few of the things that the evil central chef is angry about really strike me as offenses worthy of violent retribution. And if looked at more as a statement about capitalism writ large I still find the message here pretty muddled. The rich customers here are dicks, but the chef raging against them strikes me as plainly a bigger dick so this could just as easily be seen as a vilification of anti-capitalism as capitalism. So, as a social satire I find this muddled but I did enjoy myself just the same. Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy are both very strong here as is much of the rest of the cast and the production design of the restaurant is quite effective. The movie kept me interested the whole time, though I must say it maybe shows its hand pretty early and has trouble escalating the tension in its second half and doesn’t really deliver on any stunning revelation at the end. As a neat little genre exercise you can do worse but the film itself never really elevated past that for me.
*** out of Five
