'The menu': entertaining cooking 'thriller' in the hell of vanity

2022-12-02T11:22:01.329Z

The film, with Ralph Fiennes as the chef, is a black comedy about contemporary social nonsense, and a satire on conceit and the most insane of revenge.

Cooking and cooking shows are so fashionable that it could almost be said that too many cooking movies and series are being made, if it weren't for the fact that some of the latest ones, in addition to being great successes, have shown enough values extrinsic to the kitchen to to be able to appreciate them to their fullest extent, and not just as a sample of a subgenre for admirers and fans.

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'The Bear', one of the best series of the year, is a suffocating portrait of anxiety and mourning

It boils

(2021), by Philip Barantini, with its agitating sequence shot and its devilish rhythm, and the series

The Bear

(2022), created by Christopher Storer, with its eternal class conflict, its family tragedy and its frenzy, have been the last.

And although we must forget about frights like the Singaporean

A Family Recipe

(2018) and the Japanese

The Cook of Last Wishes

(2017), and trifles disguised as singularity like the Indian

The Lunchbox

(2013), now the American

The menu

arrives to endorse the good culinary moment on the screens.

The bet is a

thriller

of entertainment and suspense, fraught with satire on luxury restaurants, bad meta cinematographic grapes, sharp social criticism and a challenge for art as the only way to live and even die.

A unique culinary experience.

This is how the restaurant in the film is sold, only suitable for extraordinary pockets, 1,200 euros per head, located on a private island and away from any citizenry outside the establishment itself and its workers.

And that's where a series of diners arrive, all of them different in training and objectives regarding food, and with only two points in common: they have enough pasta to pay for the night, and in a way they have been chosen by the chef to put in them their art, their hatred and even their knives.

The result is an experience close to the theatrical - although with a good visual sense on the part of Mark Mylod, with extensive experience in television -, successively disturbing, lewd, funny, cruel and macabre.

Of limited depth, but effervescent.

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In their first imaginative film script, Seth Reiss and Will Tracy fire bullets in multiple directions: towards food critics (extensive, of course, to film critics), for their excessive power to make and break careers;

towards those who understand nothing about taste, pleasure and sensations, and just because they have possibilities they are regulars at this type of place, despite their insensitivity;

towards the young nouveau riche of the financial corporations;

towards the dictatorship of image and fame;

towards fans of the most sophisticated techniques who do not know how to cook something delicious and fast;

and towards the obsession with the external paraphernalia that surrounds dishes that are nothing.

In short, towards pretentiousness and the new modes of haute cuisine as an expression of an army of chefs willing to do anything,

A conglomerate of hatred that surrounds the characters, always dominated by the chef who is perfectly interpreted by Ralph Fiennes, with a burning look, diction in which each syllable is spit out and relentless rhythm in his slow and elegant phrasing, finally forming an experience that it

could connect both with an Agatha Christie

cluedo

and with a

low-calorie

Saw .

A black comedy about contemporary social nonsense, a

thriller

about the impossible dream of perfection, and a satire about conceit, stupidity, and the most insane of revenge.