The thing about fine dining, is that it’s always been a little bit fascist.
I don’t say that casually. Spend enough time in kitchens, both where the line-cooks are quietly weeping in the walk-in, and the sort where everything is torched, tweezered and photographed before it touches anyone’s tongue, and you’ll know that haute cuisine works on a power structure that would make Mussolini nod with approval. The chef-auteur is at the top, demanding everyone submit absolutely to his vision. Beneath him is a military-style hierarchy of sous chefs and line cooks who have internalised the abuse so completely, they can’t imagine any other way. At the bottom, paying for the privilege of experiencing this authoritarian theatre, are the guests. People who have convinced themselves that three drops of foam and a talk about terroir is worth spending a months rent on.
The Menu, that fever dream of culinary nihilism and class rage from Mark Mylod, gets this dynamic with all the clarity of a freshly honed knife. It’s a movie that takes the already grotesque pageant of high-end dining and takes it another logical, terrifying step forward. What if the chef acted on all those murderous impulses the industry seems built to cultivate? What would happen if he stopped acting like his contempt for the customers was anything but naked and homicidal loathing?
It turns out, the answer is the most cheerfully vicious piece of social horror since Parasite made us more uncomfortable about basement apartments.
To set the scene; Chef Slowik’s restaurant Hawthorn sits on a private island. Of course it does. The wealthy want more than exclusivity. They want geography itself to enforce borders which keep them separate from the rest of us. Getting there needs a boat ride, literally crossing into another world, and one where the morality of the mainland doesn’t quite apply. Following the same impulse that builds gated communities and private jets. That same logic which lets billionaires convince themselves they’re a different species.
The guests arrive with that certain type of performative enthusiasm which money breeds. They know they’re supposed to be impressed and goddammit, they will be. They paid for it, after all. We have the finance bros, numbed into utter stupidity by their own success. An ageing movie star, so desperate to be recognised but too important to admit it. A food critic, one whose career has been built on taking down people like Slowik, now sits at his table, a collaborator breaking bread with the resistance fighter she once turned in.
And then there’s Margot, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, with the perfect amount of dead-eyed wariness of someone who’s learned staying alive means staying alert. She’s the escort, a sex-worker, and the only person in the room honest about what she’s selling. She doesn’t belong there and she knows it. What’s more important is, Slowik knows it, too.
The meal starts. Each course a masterpiece of passive aggression, a small artwork designed to humiliate or indict its consumer. Slowik isn’t just cooking for his guests, he’s prosecuting them. The tortilla course, un-topped and unadorned, a specific insult in the language of minimalism. The breadless bread plate, a clever joke about scarcity served up to people who have never known hunger. Each dish is used as a weapon, and each explanation given is an accusation. All delivered in that reverential and hushed tone we have come to associate with fine dining and genius.
This is where the true savagery of The Menu is revealed. It’s doing more than satirising the pretensions of high-end cuisine. Although it does that flawlessly and with the precision of someone who’s read too many descriptions of “playful yet mysterious” desserts that cost forty-six dollars. It exposes the sadomasochism at the heart of the whole operation. The customers are paying to be dominated and the chef happily tortures them. Everyone is getting what they signed up for. Right up until they’re not.
There’s a reason we use the word “consumption” for both eating and shopping, and The Menu exploits that linguistic coincidence with all the subtlety of a meat cleaver to the hand. Everyone here is consumer and consumed. The guests consume their experiences, their status and each others envy. Slowik consumes his actual workers, burning away their lives and identity to service his increasingly deranged vision. The critic’s career has been consuming chef’s reputations. The actor consumes attention. The finance bros consume…everything, really. That’s their whole job description.
But what makes the movie so refreshingly honest about class-warfare in late stage capitalism is, it doesn’t pretend any of them are innocent. We don’t have a hero, that virtuous working-class person standing up with innate goodness against the corruption of the wealthy. Even Margot, the closest we have to a protagonist, is implicated. Yeah, she’s a service worker, but her chosen form of service caters to exactly these people, and depends on their money and needs.
What Slowik is doing, and this is where the horror of the movie starts to crystallise into something truly disturbing, is forcing all those guests to be honest about the transaction. You want to consume? No problem, let’s acknowledge what that means. We’ll stop pretending this is about “appreciating art” or “appreciating craft” and admit it’s about power. That it’s about having the money to demand someone stay on their feet for twelve hours creating something you’ll photograph and barely taste. It’s about reducing human creativity and labour, human suffering to a slightly funny story you’ll tell at your next dinner party.
The genius of the movie is that it makes Slowik monstrously wrong and simultaneously right. Yeah, these people are complicit in a system that treats other people as easily disposable instruments of pleasure. Of course their wealth is based on exploitation. The food critic did ruin lives with her casually cruel dismissals, the movie star did coast by on charm while contributing exactly nothing of substance and the finance bros did wipe out whole industries.
But really, none of that justifies murder. None of it makes Slowiks final act anything more than the temper tantrum of a man who wanted to be an artist and became a service worker, and who hates his guests for having the power he desires, and hates his staff for reminding him what he’s become.
Let’s talk about Chef Slowik. Ralph Fiennes plays him with the exhausted intensity of a man who gave up sleeping somewhere around 2015 and decided insomnia was a higher state of consciousness. He’s the most fascinating creation in the movie: a genius who has realised genius doesn’t matter, talent is just another commodity and that he’s spent his life perfecting a craft that exists to amuse the people he loathes.
This dark realisation is the heart of the service industry, something that every chef, waiter and bartender knows but doesn’t often say out loud: you’ll spend your life creating moments of pleasure for people who will never see you as fully human. You’re the help, just part of the ambience. Your rage and exhaustion, your crushed dreams are all just ingredients of someone else’s perfect evening.
Slowik has reached the very peak of his profession, and he has discovered that peak is a prison. He’s trapped by his success, performing endlessly for people that can’t differentiate between excellent and expensive. The waiting list, the celebrity clients, the Michelin Stars; they’re all chains. They may be made out of gold, but they’re still chains.
So he decides he’ll burn it all down. Literally. If he is going to be consumed by that system, then he’ll do the consuming. The guests want to eat? He’ll serve them up something they didn’t order; the truth regarding their own complicity, with a nice side of immolation.
It’s the extreme artist’s tantrum, the fantasy every creative person who’s had to smile and nod when some monied philistine explains what’s wrong with their work has. And The Menu is clever enough to show us both the seduction of the fantasy and its utter monstrousness. Okay, these people are awful. But you don’t get to slaughter them over it.
The most subversive move of the film is making its “hero” not a hero at all but a survivor. Margot doesn’t beat Slowik with revolutionary consciousness or superior morality. She beats him with understanding something the other guests don’t. It’s still a transaction and she knows how to negotiate.
When she asks him to make her a cheeseburger, an unpretentious, simple and non-artisanal cheeseburger, she’s doing something radical. She is refusing to participate in the theatre. She won’t pretend this is about excellence or art or any of the myriad lies haute cuisine uses to justify its existence. She’s hungry and wants food. So make her a fucking cheeseburger.
And Slowik, for the first time in years, maybe decades, gets to simply cook. Not prosecute or perform or prove anything. Just making someone something they want to eat. The most human moment in the whole movie, this exchange between the chef and the sex worker. Two people who have spent their lives performing for money, now acknowledging each other briefly as real human beings.
The cheeseburger saves her life not because it’s perfect, although in its way it is, but mainly because it reminds Slowik just why he started cooking in the first place. Before the molecular gastronomy and Michelin Stars. Before the slow descent into madness, he made food because feeding people felt good. Because there really is something basically decent about the act of nourishing another person.
Margot eats the burger, a few bites anyway, wraps up the rest and leaves. Doesn’t stay for dessert, or wait to see how the show ends. She survives because she knows just when to leave the party. Which is a skill the wealthy, so used to believing they deserve to consume everything, have not learned.
The Menu landed in November 2022, just at the moment when conversations about wealth inequality and the excesses of the rich, about who eats and who starves were getting to fever pitch. We had seen billionaires play spaceman, while people chose between groceries and rent. We had seen pandemic-era wealth transfers that made the Gilded Age look positively quaint. We had finally realised that the gulf between the rich and everyone else wasn’t just growing; it was getting to be unbridgeable, possibly even inhuman.
The movie tapped into that rage which had been simmering in the culture for years. It’s there in the guillotine jokes and eat-the-rich memes, in the casual way people now talk about billionaires as those they are a different species, and probably a hostile one. A retribution fantasy is now baked into the discourse, a desire for more than retribution; but for a kind of cosmic justice. For the rich to finally face the consequences for destroying everything they touch.
But where The Menu distinguishes itself from other class rage-porn movies and shows is, it shows us what that retribution would actually look like. And it isn’t cathartic, or heroic or righteous. It’s small, pathetic and ultimately self-defeating. When he murders his guests, Slowik doesn’t really change anything. Their wealth isn’t distributed, and the systems that created them are still intact. All he does is kill a few people and himself in a creative murder-suicide that will be off the front pages in a few days.
The movie understands something fundamental about this current moment of class rage: the fantasy of violent revenge is exactly that. A fantasy. It feels great imagining eating the rich, but to actually do it doesn’t solve anything. The problem is more than just individuals, bad as they are. It’s the system that creates and rewards them. Murdering a dozen wealthy assholes today doesn’t change the fact that capitalism will spit out a dozen more tomorrow.
What makes The Menu seriously uncomfortable, where it rises from clever satire to real social horror, is it implicates everyone who is watching. Because who goes to see a movie about a chef killing his wealthy guests in a movie called The Menu? Just who is the audience for this certain kind of entertainment?
We are.
We’re sitting there, munching the popcorn and consuming this story about consumption and enjoying the fact that wealthy people are being tortured and killed. We are the guests at Hawthorn, but we’re also Chef Slowik, and we are also the audience he’s performing for. The movie traps us in the same complicity it’s critiquing.
It’s meta-commentary that actually works and doesn’t feel like the thesis from a film student. It’s baked into the structure and execution instead of being announced with a megaphone. We like watching the wealthy suffer because the movie is beautifully made, the performances are excellent and the cinematography is gorgeous. We consume art about the emptiness of consumption, and the irony is so thick you could sauce it and serve it with the main course.
The movie also understands that, at its highest levels, fine dining has become utterly divorced from the basic human act of eating. It’s all concept and presentation, Instagram-ready moments that prioritise appearance over nourishment. Hawthorn and Slowiks guests aren’t there to satisfy any hunger. They’re there to build experiences, and add another story to their witty repertoire of elite consumption.
That’s the real horror. Not that Slowik kills his guests, but that nobody there was really alive in the first place. They’re performing roles in a script written by capital, just going through the motions dictated by cultural expectations and class position. The killing is almost beside the point. They were already dead. Already consumed by the very system they thought they controlled.
So just why is The Menu the most vicious social satire of this decade? Mainly because it offers us no easy answers or comfortable positions to occupy. We aren’t allowed to pretend that we’re outside the system it’s critiquing. It tells us that everyone is complicit, everyone is predator and prey, everyone is eating and being eaten.
The final image of the movie, Margot sitting on that boat, eating her cheeseburger and watching Hawthorn burn, doesn’t give a sense of triumph. It’s just survival. She may have got out, but the system continues. Another restaurant will spring up in Hawthorn’s place. The wealthy will find another place to throw their money. And the service workers will keep smiling, keep serving, and keep swallowing their rage, until maybe one of them doesn’t.
The Menu gets that class warfare in the United States isn’t some far off revolutionary. It’s the air we’re all breathing and the water we’re all swimming in. Every transaction is a small battle, and every meal a negotiation of power. The question is not whether you’re taking part in the war, you are. Whether you like it or not. The question is if you’re aware of it, if you’re honest about it and if you know when to make your escape.
And if you’re sitting there reading this and thinking you’d never be like those guests, or be so oblivious to your own complacency, just ask yourself this: how much did you pay for your last meal, and who made it? Did you think of them at all, or were they just part of the ambience? Invisible servants in your personal narrative of elegant consumption?
Yeah. That’s what I thought.
Bon appétit.
