Mark Mylod’s The Menu drops a young couple on a private island to eat at Hawthorn, an exclusive restaurant run by celebrity chef Julian Slowik. The chef has prepared a lavish menu. He has also prepared some shocking surprises. The film runs 107 minutes. It is a 2022 American comedy horror thriller, and it is very good at being both until it decides to explain itself.
Ralph Fiennes plays Slowik. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Margot Mills, the date of foodie Tyler Ledford, played by Nicholas Hoult. Hong Chau is Elsa, the maître d’hôtel who notices early that Margot is not Tyler’s original guest. That small break in the reservation is the hinge the whole night turns on.
The Menu premiered at the 47th Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, 2022, and Searchlight Pictures released it in the United States on November 18, 2022. It grossed $79.6 million worldwide and drew positive reviews. Fiennes and Taylor-Joy were both nominated at the 80th Golden Globe Awards, for Best Actor and Best Actress – Musical or Comedy. The film took five nominations at the 51st Saturn Awards, including Best Thriller Film.
Trailer, via SearchlightPictures.
The Tortillas and the Third Course
The dinner escalates by design. Slowik introduces a series of increasingly unsettling courses. For the third course, uncomfortable truths about each guest are laser-etched onto tortillas. Sous-chef Jeremy Louden kills himself at the start of the fourth. When Richard Liebrandt tries to leave, the staff cuts off his finger as a warning. Slowik has Doug Verrick, his angel investor, drowned in front of the guests.
The guests are not random. They are food critic Lillian Bloom and her editor Ted Feldman, wealthy regulars Richard and Anne Liebrandt, washed-up movie star George Diaz and his assistant Felicity Lynn, and business partners Soren, Dave and Bryce. Slowik’s alcoholic mother, Linda Slowik, is there too. Each one, he says, either caused him to lose his passion for his craft or exploited food artisans like himself. All will be dead by the night’s end.
That is the engine. It is also where the film’s aim starts to wobble. A satire that names its targets one by one can feel like a list rather than a story, and The Menu sometimes reads its own charges aloud instead of letting them land.
Margot, Erin Willis, and the Unplanned Guest
Margot was not on the guest list, so Slowik gives her a private choice: die with the staff or die with the guests. When she hesitates, he picks the staff for her. She then admits she is an escort named Erin Willis, whose clients included Richard, who hired her to roleplay.
Taylor-Joy is the best thing in the film because she is the only person in the room who wants out rather than a verdict. Fiennes plays Slowik with a calm that makes the violence feel administrative. Hoult’s Tyler is a fanboy, and the film is cruelest to him, which is correct.
The fifth course gives Slowik what he wants: he lets Katherine, an employee he sexually harassed, stab him. The female guests dine with Katherine. The male guests get a chance to escape the island. Slowik’s staff catch all of them. Ted, the last caught, is rewarded with a Passard egg dish.
What the Menu Actually Serves
| Element | What The Menu does | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Slowik’s motive speech | Names every guest’s offense | Turns subtext into a lecture |
| Jeremy Louden’s death | Arrives early, without warning | Sets a bar the later kills don’t clear |
| Margot’s reveal as Erin | Gives Taylor-Joy a second role to play | Comes late, and the film rushes past it |
| Ted’s Passard egg | A reward for the last man caught | The film’s coldest, best joke |
The ranking of the courses matters more than any single one. Here is how the night actually escalates:
- The tour, where Elsa flags Margot as an unplanned guest.
- The early courses, unsettling but survivable.
- The laser-etched tortillas, where the guests learn what Slowik thinks of them.
- Jeremy Louden’s suicide and Richard’s finger.
- Verrick’s drowning.
- Katherine stabs Slowik.
- The escape attempt, and Ted’s egg.
- The final choice between staff and guests.
The Menu is funniest when it is coldest. The tortillas, the finger, the egg — these are the moments where the film trusts its own cruelty and does not stop to justify it. The trouble is the speech. Once Slowik explains that his guests either caused him to lose his passion for his craft or exploited food artisans like himself, the film stops trusting its own cruelty and starts explaining it.
That is a real loss. The Menu had a chance to be about the transaction itself — the money, the performance, the people who eat and the people who cook — without ever saying so. Instead it says so, at length, and the saying is weaker than the showing.
The comparison that matters is not The Menu against other dinner-party thrillers. It is The Menu against its own first hour. The first hour is a machine. The last act is a statement. Machines are scarier.
Still, this is a sharp, well-acted film with a clear point of view and no interest in being liked. Fiennes and Taylor-Joy carry it. Chau’s Elsa is a small, perfect piece of menace. The 107 minutes move.
The Menu is worth your time, and it is worth arguing about afterward, which is more than most films manage. In this critic’s view, it just is not as clever as it thinks it is in the final course.
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