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The Menu
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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Menu’ on Hulu, a Slashy Satire Starring Ralph Fiennes as a Sociopathic Chef Serving Up Seven-Course Horror
In The Menu, Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Margot, a young woman who goes on a date with the food-obsessed Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) to an exclusive, expensive restaurant located on a small, private island. Margot and Tyler are joined by several other guests, each of whom is incredibly wealthy and has shelled out over a thousand dollars for a meal cooked by the famed celebrity chef named Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), who lives, along with his staff, on the secluded island.
But things aren’t what they seem and the chef’s menu for that particular evening was created not to amuse anyone’s bouche, but to be a scathing social commentary about the rich pricks who dine at Slowik’s restaurant to enhance their status without ever truly tasting the labor and love that has gone into the morsels in front of them. Slowik and his team of sous chefs have decided that this meal will be the last one that Slowik will ever serve – and the last one everyone else will eat.
The term “foodie” has gone from being a descriptor of people who appreciate good food to a derisive term about people who latch on to food trends, and The Menu skewers everyone who falls into either category using pitch-black comedy and often gruesome violence to get its point across. If you’re a fan of dark satires full of class and social commentary, here are 7 movies like The Menu, including recent films like Triangle of Sadness and that old Hitchcock classic, Rope, that you can make a meal of.
'Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery'
Rating: PG-13
Cast: Edward Norton, Daniel Craig, Kate Hudson, Janelle Monáe, Dave Bautista
Description: Both The Menu and Glass Onion are dark comedies that feature large ensemble casts lured to private, luxe islands where a dangerous game involving murder is about to be played. But while The Menu takes aim at rich, ungrateful foodies who are lured to the island with the promise of an incredible, indulgent meal, Glass Onion‘s only food commentary involves the hilarious references to Jeremy Renner’s small-batch hot sauce and Jared Leto’s kombucha (though both products ultimately become important characters in their own right). Both films consist of incredible ensembles, clever dialogue, and a cunning man with unknown motives who lives on an island, though Glass Onion has the incomparable Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) there to help solve the underlying murder mystery.
'Triangle Of Sadness'
Rating: R
Cast: Charlbi Dean, Harris Dickinson, Woody Harrelson, Vicki Berlin
Description: 2022’s Triangle of Sadness is to luxury cruises what The Menu was to prix-fixe dining. The film stars the late Charlbi Dean and Harris Dickinson as a young influencer couple invited to take a free luxury cruise (captained by Woody Harrelson) in exchange for posting about it on Insta. Things go disastrously wrong when the yacht capsizes and the guests are stranded on an island and have to fend for themselves in order to survive. The black comedy won the Palm d’Or at Cannes and is the last film Dean made before her tragic death in 2022.
'Get Out'
Rating: R
Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener, LaKeith Stanfield, Lil Rel Howery
Description: Jordan Peele has become the master of modern social commentary, and 2017’s Get Out was his directorial debut. Like The Menu, it features an ensemble cast of characters who seem like they could be normal, until it turns out that they’re actually a bunch of dangerously deluded racists.
Daniel Kaluuya plays Chris, the Black boyfriend of WASP-y Rose Armitage (Allison Williams), who invites him to visit her family home and meet her parents Dean and Missy (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener). Chris maintains that something is wrong throughout their visit, noticing that the only other Black people he’s met at their home act strange. Soon he discovers that the Armitage have sinister, racist motives for bringing him to their home, and he needs to, you know, get out.
'Snowpiercer'
Rating: R
Cast: Chris Evans, John Hurt, Octavia Spencer, Jamie Bell, Tilda Swinton
Description: Snowpiercer is considered a post-apocalyptic action movie but, like The Menu, it’s also an effective critique on economic class structures and who gets to determine them. The Bong Joon-Ho film takes place entirely on a high-speed train that holds the last remaining humans on earth, the only survivors of a man-made ice age. The train is operated by a mysterious, unseen man named Charles Wilford, who not only is responsible for keeping the engine running in order to keep everyone alive and safe from the cold, but he has also enforced a class system aboard, with the lowest-class citizens living in squalor at the rear of the train. Chris Evans stars as Curtis, a lower-class citizen who has endured the awful conditions at the back of the train for 17 years, and who leads a rebellion against the upper class to try and wrestle control away from Wilford. Come for the action, stay for Tilda Swinton’s incredible performance (and her dentures).
'Parasite'
Rating: R
Cast: Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Lee Jung-eun, Choi Woo-shik
Description: Parasite is the second Bong Joon Ho movie on our list. While Snowpiercer was an action movie that featured an obvious social commentary about power and classism, Parasite is a dark comedy thriller that also places the contrast of rich and poor front and center. The film shows the horrors experienced by the poor Kim family, each of whom work for the wealthy Park family, though the Parks don’t know that the Kims are all related to one another. The Kims infiltrate the Parks’ home and lives, and make a shocking discovery about what’s been lurking just below the surface of the Parks’ home.
'The Last Supper'
Rating: R
Cast: Cameron Diaz, Courtney B. Vance, Annabeth Gish, Jonathan Penner, Ron Perlman, Ron Eldard
Description: Ralph Fiennes’ character wasn’t the first one to use the idea of a lavish dinner as the setting for killing your ideological enemies. 1995’s long-forgotten The Last Supper, which co-starred Cameron Diaz, Courtney B. Vance, Annabeth Gish, Jonathan Penner, and Ron Eldard, features a similar plot. In the film, these five politically liberal graduate students invite conservatives to dinner at their home, including neo-Nazis, rapists, and homophobes, and kill them off one by one. Things get interesting when they invite a famous right-wing pundit (Ron Perlman, in a role inspired by Rush Limbaugh) and he catches on to their plan to kill him.
'Rope'
Rating: PG
Cast: James Stewart, John Dall, Farley Granger, Dick Hogan
Description: Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film Rope is an obvious inspiration in many ways for The Menu, as both films allow the audience to wonder what right anyone has to weed out society’s weak or “bad” people.
In the 1948 film, friends Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan (John Dall and Farley Granger) strangle a former classmate of theirs, David Kentley, with a piece of rope. They stuff his body in a trunk which they use that night as a buffet to serve food on at a dinner party with guests that include David’s own father and fiancée.
The group of assorted guests wonder where David is and why he hasn’t arrived yet, never realizing his body is right in front of them, while an old professor of the young men, Rupert Cadell (James Stewart), catches on to the game these men are playing, and starts to wonder what’s inside the trunk.
