Afrigather Our appetites may be shifting in direction of a brand new sort of meals media—one which’s very darkish and perhaps a bit sincere. Late 2021 gave us Boiling Level, a excessive stakes drama concerning the pressures of working in knowledgeable kitchen. Extra lately, The Bear provided its viewers a have a look at the chaotic, messy day-to-day of a struggling neighborhood sandwich joint, with an outline of abuse and toxicity so correct that many pro chefs struggled to get through the whole series. And now, a brand new trailer for The Menu, in theaters this November, takes this pattern to its logical conclusion: outright horror.
The movie will comply with Nicholas Hoult reverse Anya Taylor-Pleasure—star of Netflix’s pandemic hit The Queen’s Gambit—because the pair expertise a limited-seating tasting menu at an upper-crust restaurant on a small, secluded island. However relatively than an area for scrumptious indulgence, The Menu will depict wonderful eating because the setting for an anxiety-inducing thriller, as company are hunted and trapped by a murderous movie star chef, performed by Ralph Fiennes. It’s Jiro Desires of Sushi—if Jiro additionally needed to straight up homicide his company.
Though the movie is clearly fiction, the trailer alone attracts loads of comparisons to worshipful meals docs. There are Chef’s Desk-esque macro pictures of oysters, tweezer-constructed amuse bouches, and delicately piped sauces, all paired with a sinister, classical rating, evoking a funhouse model of the meals documentary sequence. The filmmakers went so far as hiring three-Michelin-starred chef Dominique Crenn as a marketing consultant, hopefully beefing up the realism consider its portrayal of los angeles creme de la creme eating places.
Hawthorne, The Menu’s central restaurant, seems harking back to farm-to-table eating places like Blue Hill at Stone Barns (featured within the first season of Chef’s Desk). Hawthorne employees seem to develop, harvest, and put together all the meals they serve on the restaurant’s grounds the place all of them stay as a “household.” And certain, these types of sustainable practices sound nice in a meals doc, however they’re equally at dwelling in a dying cult investigation like Wild Wild Nation. The Menu employees bark “Sure chef!”—the runaway catchphrase of The Bear, I would add—with a coordination that goes previous respectful, nicely into creepy devotion, as if to say: This world will be culty, it may be sinister, it may be flat out terrifying.
Whereas it’s exhausting to inform if The Menu’s kitchen employees is really cannibalistic—a chef does seem to chop off a patron’s finger within the trailer—the tone screams “eat the wealthy” all through. That is no shock from director Mark Mylod, an government producer on HBO’s Succession, whose work is clearly anxious concerning the absurdity of a world the place some have private jets whereas others haven’t any personal jets. If exhibits like The Bear uncovered the trauma that kitchen employees endure for his or her company, perhaps The Menu will provide a colder answer for embittered line cooks and fed up service employees. Why spit in somebody’s stew when you possibly can spit on their grave as an alternative?
