The Menu 4K 2022 2160p WEB-DL Dolby Vision

A young couple arrives at a fashionable restaurant on a remote island. The establishment is run by an eccentric chef who offers rich guests a new special tasting menu.

The Menu 4K Review
The past cinematic year surprised with a non-trivial trend in gastronomy - after the perky "Bear" by Hiro Murai and the eccentric "Eruption of Taste" by Peter Strickland, "Menu" by Mark Mallod was released in international cinemas. Probably the first thriller in the career of a British director who hasn't gone beyond comedies - funny ("The Big White Ladyship") and not so funny ("How Much Do You Have?") - for many years. For Milode, "The Menu" was definitely a kind of step out of his genre comfort zone, an attempt to play on the audience's nerves and, in some ways, even shock them.

A big fan of cooking shows, Tyler (Nicholas Holt) and his girlfriend Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) travel to a distant island to attend a dinner party for genius chef Julian Slovick (Rafe Fiennes). The heroes have no idea that in a couple of hours the long-awaited event, which brought together all the cream of society, will turn into mental and physical torture for them, in which the main sadist is the same famous chef.

Like Ruben Estlund's acclaimed Triangle of Sorrow, Menu doesn't at first appear to be the most veiled mockery of the privileged class, an assemblage of rich people who have become addicted to taking everything and everyone around them for granted, drowning in their own spiritual emptiness and arrogant pretentiousness. Each of Julian Slovick's guests, whether an elite restaurant critic or an aging star of American sitcoms, came to his dinner not for mere hedonistic pleasure, but for the status and exclusivity of the very fact of his presence at this memorable evening. Later Julian would accuse his clients of hypocrisy - and he would be absolutely right. Over many years working in the best establishments of the world Slowick has learned to distinguish all shades of elitist duplicity, which eventually reduced his sincere love of cooking in a state of tedious obsession - an eternally unsatisfied desire for perfection. Alas, Julian's character found himself so consumed with righteous anger at the rich people who devalued his meals that he didn't notice how he himself lost a significant amount of humanity.

In time, the dinner ceases to be languid and turns into a veritable theater of the absurd, each successive act of which makes the guests more and more fidgety in their chairs. Alas, it does not take them long to realize that the exclusive presentation, supposedly designed to change the focus of perception of food, hides outright mockery. As events unfold, the degree of Slowik's madness only grows, but fake applause continues to swell around him. Tyler, of course, tries the hardest, a devoted admirer of the chief, ready to sign off on the compliments at every opportunity.

In the disarming crankiness of the chef's guests one can see a not too exaggerated reference to the consumer society, for which the fact of possessing an object is always more important than its spiritual value. However, the overly cartoonish characters and the rather sketchy emotional dramaturgy of screenwriters Seth Reiss and Will Tracy do not really get into the events taking place in "The Menu". Even the leading figure of the movie - psychopathic Chief Slovick, played brilliantly by Ralph Fiennes, seems too blurred, the character of Ani Taylor-Joy looks like she was created just for the bright final twist.

That said, visually, "The Menu" is striking in its gorgeous frame geometry, which unwittingly references the chef's obsessive desire to bring each dish to absolute perfection. The only problem is that in cooking, as in any other art form, the process of perception is always more important than the result. And in this respect, The Menu looks like a film that may not be the spiciest, but it is not boring at all.