The third course arrives as a stack of tortillas, and each one has a guest’s ugliest truth burned into it with a laser. That is the moment The Menu stops pretending to be dinner. Mark Mylod, working from a script by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, shuts a table of rich diners in with a celebrity chef on a remote island, and every course brings a shock. The film is a comedy and a horror story at once, and the seam between the two is where it lives.

The restaurant is called Hawthorn, and Ralph Fiennes runs it as Chef Slowik. Nicholas Hoult plays Tyler, a devoted foodie, and Anya Taylor-Joy plays Margot, the date he brings along. Around them sit Janet McTeer as the critic Lillian, Paul Adelstein as her editor Ted, John Leguizamo as a washed-up movie star with his assistant Felicity (Aimee Carrero), Rob Yang and Arturo Castro as the business partners Bryce and Soren, and Reed Birney as the regular Richard. The film never lines them up for a roll call. It lets each of them give themselves away one course at a time, so the table starts to feel less like a party than a trial.

Fiennes carries the whole thing. His Slowik rarely raises his voice and never seems to need your approval. He sounds like a man who has run out of passion for his craft and is too tired to pretend otherwise. When he finally explains why these particular people were invited, he says that they either drained the joy out of his work or exploited artisans like him, and that nobody will leave alive. He says it almost gently. Plenty of scenes are funny, but the laughter keeps dying halfway up the throat, because what is happening at the table is too cruel to enjoy for long.

The violence builds in small steps, and the film knows how to make each one heavier than the last. A sous-chef takes his own life at the start of the fourth course. When Richard tries to leave, the staff cut off his finger as a warning to the others. Later the men are offered a chance to run for it, and Slowik’s people catch every one of them. Ted, the last to be caught, is rewarded with a plate of Passard’s egg. That detail is the sharpest joke in the film, a prize that is also a punishment, handed over with perfect courtesy.

Margot is the one piece that was never in the chef’s plan, and the script does its best work around her. Slowik offers her a private choice: die with the staff or die with the guests. She hesitates, so he decides for her. Soon after, she admits that her name is Erin and that she is an escort, and that Richard was once a client who paid her to play his daughter. Then comes the turn I admire most. Tyler knew the guests were going to be killed. Hawthorn does not seat lone diners, so he hired Margot to stand in for an ex-girlfriend. He paid a stranger for a chair at the table, and he still did not care what the evening would cost anyone else.

That is a better idea than any of the executions, and I wish the film trusted it more. Instead it keeps adding subjects: class, labour, creativity, the cult of the critic, the appetite of people with too much money. They often step on each other. The middle stretch loses momentum, and Slowik’s long speech about his motives says aloud what the earlier scenes had already made clear. Margot’s scuffle in the chef’s living quarters also feels abrupt, a sudden lurch from satire into a fight. The ending is satisfying but a little smaller than the dread that came before it.

Critics have been fairly consistent about this. The Guardian, reviewing it out of Toronto, called it a fun, if throwaway, stew of class satire, and the Roger Ebert site felt it was not as clever as it thinks it is. Both verdicts seem fair to me. The film has an eye for its targets and a cast that enjoys itself, but it leaves little behind once the lights come up.

The Menu had its world premiere at the 47th Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, 2022, and reached American cinemas on November 18 through Searchlight Pictures. It grossed 79.6 million dollars worldwide. At the 80th Golden Globe Awards, Fiennes and Taylor-Joy were nominated for Best Actor and Best Actress in the Musical or Comedy category, and the film earned five nominations at the 51st Saturn Awards, including Best Thriller Film.

What stays with me is Tyler’s chair, and the fact that he never once thought it was too expensive.