Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Taste of Hunger’ on Hulu, a Danish Drama About a Foodie Couple’s Disintegrating Marriage

Danish film A Taste of Hunger – now on Hulu – dishes out a fresh variation on the food-porn subgenre: TENTACLE food porn! Fishy Scandinavian cuisine is the MacGuffin in this busted romance in which Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Katrine Greis-Rosenthal play restaurateurs who compromise their marriage on a quest for a Michelin star. So if you’re a sucker for a heady melodrama garnished with a succulent octopus appendage, maybe this movie will whet your appetite.

A TASTE OF HUNGER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The way Carsten (Coster-Waldau) runs his kitchen, one might think he was a drill sergeant prior to being a chef. A nasty, angry, demanding, exacting, fascist drill sergeant. Carsten was millimeters away from receiving fellatio from his wife and business partner Maggie (Greis-Rosenthal) when his phone blinged and he learned a “single diner” came into the restaurant. It HAS to be the Michelin man, as in, the guy who could award him a coveted star designating his restaurant as one of the world’s best. The man is gone when Carsten gets to the restaurant, at which point he learns that the oyster dish the maybe-Michelin man ate was not perfect. Carsten dresses down and fires the sous-chef in front of the entire staff, who respond to their dear boss leader in rigid SIR YES SIR fashion. “I just don’t understand how it’s possible that we serve over-fermented lemons!” Carsten yells, giving voice to our universal lament as a species that wants, nay, needs our lemons to be fermented JUST SO.

Meanwhile, a typed anonymous note appears on Carsten’s desk. It reads simply, “your wife loves someone else.” Maggie intercepts the note and pockets it, then dashes out the door. Her goal is to keep her infidelity secret – and find the Michelin man, wherever he is here in Copenhagen, and do whatever she can to persuade him to give the cuisine a second spin. As this drama plays out over the course of an evening, we get flashbacks with flashy title cards reading HEAT, SOUR, SALT, etc., flavoring a variety of backstory subplots, e.g., when Carsten and Maggie met and fell in love, when they began to grow apart, when Maggie starts sleeping with Frederik (Charlie Gustafsson).

Quite notably, the restaurant’s success hinges wholly on the Michelin star. Without it, they can’t justify overcharging food rubes/snobs for teensy portions of exquisitely conceived and manicured plates – mmm, blackened tentacles! – and they’ll go bankrupt. All they do is work work work, and their two young children gripe, “You talk too much about food.” Their desire to achieve highly subjective recognition from a mysterious, secretive and powerful entity like Michelin is a mighty gamble. Their family, their livelihoods, the lives they desire? All on the line. We meet them just as life hands them lemons, and what do they do? Over-ferment the goddamn things.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: A Taste of Hunger is like chef’s-journey movies like Burnt or Chef flavored with hints of the seedy restaurant underground of Pig, food porn a la Big Night or Like Water for Chocolate and the warring couples of Kramer vs. Kramer or Marriage Story – but directed by Nicolas Winding-Refn if he was relatively boring and toned down the kitsch and violence.

Performance Worth Watching: Both of our protagonists are generally unlikable sorts on something resembling redemption arcs. But Greis-Rosenthal’s character is more complex, and she therefore gives the stronger portrayal of a person torn between her many needs, wants and desires.

Memorable Dialogue: Carsten can’t avoid the food analogies even when he’s having the marital fight of his life: “This relationship fits into a f—ing Tupperware!”

Sex and Skin: Some sexual situations sans nudeness.

Our Take: The one-sheet for A Taste of Hunger puts our two principals in an unclothed embrace atop a colorful smorgasbord of mushrooms, wild apples and octopus. The film it represents is relatively timid though, only hinting at the fetishes and darker themes that could’ve made this a weirder, more challenging and ambiguous story. Director/co-writer Christoffer Boe indulges the artsy visuals and operatic flourishes of nontraditional cinema, but pulls back before it gets too interesting. Somewhere in the haughty pretension and snobbery of the haute-cuisine scene is a black comedy begging to be made, but this isn’t it; with the exception of one psychodramatically troublesome moment and occasional eyebrow-raising histrionics, Boe puts fancy visual dressing atop the usual cliches about how people who put work before family reap their own misery.

This doesn’t mean the movie’s a wash, however. Its crisp flashback structure and strong lead performances keep us reasonably invested in Maggie and Carsten’s well-being as a couple who found mutual affection in the kitchen, but are now so consumed by their career goals, they have no time or space for a quick blowsie in the bathroom. Somewhere in A Taste of Hunger is a better movie, but the one Boe lands on is medium-compelling – his thoughtful artifice and thematic blandness is akin to serving smoked quail with a side of potato chips.

Our Call: What, you telling me you wouldn’t eat the quail and the chips? STREAM IT, just don’t expect anything more than a good, solid, watchable drama.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.