Polygon is on the bottom on the 2022 Fantastic Fest, reporting on new horror, sci-fi, cult, and motion films making their solution to theaters and streaming. This assessment was printed at the side of the movie’s Fantastic Fest premiere.

2021’s film scene of the yr — the one which dominated critic and cinephile discuss throughout awards season — got here from Michael Sarnoski’s Pig, a deliriously violent however quiet thriller about Nicolas Cage’s ex-chef chasing down his stolen truffle pig. At one level, Cage’s character, Rob, a retired chef turned backwoods recluse, sits down in a ritzy haute delicacies restaurant and summons the chef, a former worker of his. Without elevating his voice, Rob verbally tears the person aside for giving up his goals of proudly owning an intimate, comfy pub. “Every day, you wake up and there’ll be less of you,” Rob tells the chef, who seems gutted — however not like he disagrees. “You live your life for them, and they don’t even see you. You don’t even see yourself.”

Mark Mylod’s black, bloody comedic thriller The Menu performs out like a sequel to that scene, if the hapless high-end chef had determined to show Rob’s revelation outward towards his clientele as an alternative of inward. The Menu mocks the type of people that would eat at that restaurant Chef Rob despises, with its “emulsified scallops” and “foraged huckleberry foam, bathed in the smoke from Douglas fir cones.” But it additionally finds slightly humanity in them as effectively. One of probably the most intriguing issues concerning the film is the best way the filmmakers discover room to skewer each goal in sight.

Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Margot, a last-minute date for wealthy foodie obsessive Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), who’s secured a seating at an unique restaurant on a non-public island, headed by the famend Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). Margot doesn’t care concerning the form of meals that consists of some artfully spaced blotches of sauce on a plate, billed as a cheeky “breadless bread course.” But Tyler is obsessive about Chef Slowik’s work, and the potential for incomes his consideration and curiosity. They’re an odd couple from the beginning, with an odd stress between them that implies secrets and techniques ready to be revealed.

Image: Searchlight Pictures

They aren’t the one ones with secrets and techniques. The different diners on this specific night embrace a smug meals critic (Janet McTeer) and her sycophantic editor (Paul Adelstein), a minor film star (John Leguizamo) and his assistant (Aimee Carrero), a trio of loud tech boors who begin the evening off by boasting about fraudulently expensing their dinner, and an older couple who really feel they could acknowledge Margot. Then there’s Chef Slowik, who’s deliberate a harmful “menu” for the night designed to convey the secrets and techniques to gentle.

How far Chef Slowik is keen to go, and what’s occurring with Margot, make up a lot of the problems in The Menu. Otherwise, it would simply play out as a reasonably grim and acquainted revenge thriller geared toward some straightforward targets: wealthy, entitled, impolite, self-satisfied folks. If there weren’t extra occurring below the floor, The Menu would danger coming throughout as a elaborate model of a kind of teen slashers that’s extra about watching symbolically obnoxious, shallow younger folks getting mown down by a killer.

Instead, Seth Reiss and Will Tracy’s script doles out the revelations with a cautious sense of pacing and escalation, conserving a steadiness of sympathies between victims and mastermind. They clearly don’t anticipate the viewers to thoroughly throw in with the folks paying $1,250 apiece for a minimalist dinner, principally for bragging rights concerning the expertise. They don’t depart their victims as ciphers, both. Margot naturally will get heart stage, and Taylor-Joy provides her a fierce, brittle “I’m totally over this nonsense” power that makes her a compelling protagonist. Hoult provides an equally robust efficiency as a person being pressured to return to phrases along with his personal pretensions in a very painful approach. But every character in flip will get slightly stage time, together with Chef Slowik’s devoted assistant, Elsa (Hong Chau, recent off The Whale, however most memorable because the villain within the 2019 Watchmen sequence).

And Fiennes himself is a substantial asset, as normal. He directs the motion at his restaurant like a cult chief, places on a heat, benevolent face when it fits the story, then brings a ruthless type of chilly psychopathy to the desk for different scenes. Trying to guess what’s below his floor is without doubt one of the film’s larger challenges, and certainly one of its greatest joys, principally as a result of he’s scripted and carried out as a villain with a number of sympathetic wrinkles, a person who courts empathy and evokes horror on the identical time.

Image: Searchlight Pictures

The Menu usually reads like an expansive model of a single-set play, the place a gaggle of individuals pressured into shut proximity progressively crack below strain and reveal new issues about themselves. A variety of what retains it going isn’t that stagey power, however the staging itself. manufacturing designer Ethan Tobman was impressed by all the pieces from Luis Buñuel’s devastating 1962 movie The Exterminating Angel (one other movie about smug elites who can’t escape one another) to German expressionist structure. He and cinematographer Peter Deming give the movie a harsh, punishing chilliness that emphasizes each the dearth of consolation or heat in haute delicacies and the state of Chef Slowik’s thoughts. It’s an appropriately luxurious and sense-driven movie, with one thing putting to take a look at in each body.

The Menu doesn’t all the time add up, although. There’s an odd unwillingness to decide to the movie’s Grand Guignol potential, seemingly out of a want to maintain the forged round for the ultimate act. There’s a disconnect between Chef Slowik’s hatred of his company and the extent of their comparative crimes, a few of that are much more private and significant than others. The movie’s contempt for vanity and entitlement is easy and satisfying, however when different motives begin driving the story, like Elsa’s jealousy over Margot or Chef Slowik’s rage over not having every of his dishes remembered, the revenge story curdles a bit.

Still, Reiss and Tracy’s willingness to implicate Chef Slowik alongside along with his useless, surface-obsessed plan provides The Menu some startling intrigue. Like the pretentious chef Nicolas Cage calls out in Pig, Slowik engineered his personal downfall and his personal torment, and The Menu doesn’t let him off the hook by enjoying out as a simple eat-the-rich morality story. The humor on this film is generally delicate (significantly within the hilariously wry course titles that seem on display screen), however it’s in the end as a lot of a comedy as a horror-thriller. There’s some knuckle-biting stress as viewers wait to see the way it’ll all play out, however Mylod and the writers additionally recommend that it’s value chuckling slightly at everybody concerned, whether or not they’re serving up fancy variations of mayhem or simply paying by the nostril for it.

The Menu premieres in theaters on Nov. 18.