The Menu

Smoking murders your palate, wouldbe gourmand Tyler advises date Margot in the film’s first scene, as they prepare to leave for the special $1,250/plate dinner on a remote island. Haute cuisine here also kills.

Margot is a last-minute replacement for the woman Tyler originally booked for the dinner. Her arrival disturbs the management because she doesn’t readily qualify for the master Chef Slowik’s intention: a burning Day of Judgment both for all the “Takers” who selfishly abuse humanity and nature and for all the “Givers” who abet them. With the rage of an Old Testament prophet Slowik plans to destroy the entire system, the evil and those who serve them. At least, the system on that island.

Because Margot does not belong on the 12-sinner guest list, for this precious Last Supper, Slowik allows her to choose whether to die among the Takers or among the Givers.  When she is tricked into radioing for outside help, Slowik demotes her to the Takers.

But Margot is radically unlike all the others. Unlike the suicidal Givers working the kitchen and the fortress, she has not sold her soul to the charismatic charlatan chef (an echo of Trump and the other populist false gods). Unlike the Takers, she comes from the service industries. Depending on serving others, she has learned how to protect herself and how to deal with unexpected threats. The servicers are not as helpless as the served, the self-servicers. 

Likelier an expensive escort than a waitress, Margot outsmarts the brilliant despot chef by slipping him out of his rigid pattern of behaviour into another one. He is locked into the routine of high concept absurdly specialist dishes, over which he asserts mortal authority. To escape Slowik she shifts him into another plot. By rejecting his food she challenges his manhood and authority. By ordering a prosaic cheeseburger she shifts him into another pattern of bahaviour. Powerful with his own menu, he’s helpless in her new script, her "menu." She requests a takeout box. When Chef Slowik provides that their new pattern of behaviour allows her to leave with it. 

The satire in this brilliant, harsh work cuts all ways. Except for Margot, all the other diners are demonstrably selfish and corrupt. One’s husband, dressed executive, is among Margot’s clients. His chopped-off finger is a euphemism, Another table seats men criminally associated with the island owner. A compromised highclass restaurant reviewer is with grovelling enabler. The famous movie star has such a rampaging ego he won’t let his PA quit. Slowik condemns her to die because she didn’t fund her Brown U degree with student loans. They all deserve to die, determines the master chef, who panders to their privilege with “meals” of absurd scarcity, pretentiousness and wastefulness.      

The customers are first disturbed when their tacos bear photos of their various guilts. Here they are supposed to eat what they are, not the minute refinement to which they aspire. The chef humiliates pretentious Tyler by letting him expose his own overblown claim to know cuisine. Tyler hangs himself, following the staff Chef wannabe Jeremy, who blows his brains. He wanted the Chef’s life but fell short so he makes himself a menu item. Not even the Chef’s death-in-life mother escape the moral anesthetizing, stupor and ultimate murder by her prize son. At last, a matricide on the menu not the mattress.

The Chef rails against the public vulgarization of “eating.” But his preciosity in addressing absurd “tastes” is an equivalent folly and abuse of nature. Appropriately, having presumed to a moral superiority for his aesthetic dedication of diet, the Chef and his robotized followers die with their target victims in a conflagration of Smores. The gourmands and their slaves burn away in treacly vulgarity, melting together.

The coincidence of this film’s release with Triangle of Sadness (see my blog) suggests a widening awareness of the growing abyss between the Takers and the Givers. Instead of yacht workers saving their helpless masters, though, here the system is so compromised that the Givers prove as selfless and suicidal as the Takers. They all perpetuate the system — and devote themselves to an amoral leader with far less character than charisma.  

“I told you we weren’t leaving,” asserts the smug movie star. Of course, he’s used to “living” in disaster/horror movie scripts. But his attempt to escape this one fails. More like his victims than he would believe, the Chef has reduced himself to a menu item, serving up his own integrity with every silly dish. While he is unable to revise or control his compulsions, our Margot does. She escapes that absurd, fatal menu by requesting the humble cheeseburger. She has the heart and intelligence to deploy it.