#i don’t buy anya taylor joy as someone who doesn’t know about the culture of high end dining and it’s eccentricities

[marisatomay]

Interested to know whyd you give The Menu 1 star on letterboxd !!

i didn’t like it

[austencollins]

prev reblog reminded me of this but i heartily did not enjoy the menu. very prettily shot and well-acted, but it drags and isn’t thrilling or suspenseful or smart enough. spoilers below the cut:

normally i enjoy it when i can guess a twist ahead of time because it makes me feel smart -- and the fact that i guessed this twist based on nothing more than 1-3 minutes of screentime makes me impressed with Anya Taylor-Joy & Nicholas Hoult’s acting -- but OOF was it ever obvious that the female lead was gonna turn out to be a sex worker. like it felt so obvious it made me wonder if i’d been spoiled in advance and just forgotten about that. but really, just the fact that she’s dismissive, indifferent & ignorant about the whole foodie thing while nicholas hoult’s character is so into food that he’s taking them on this big special restaurant trip is a big tip-off that they’re not really dating or even familiar with one another.

it also made their conversations & interactions so boring. the characters can’t say anything interesting about themselves because it will spoil the reveal that he hired an escort -- but they also can’t say anything interesting about anything to one another, because the script is too busy going “see??? he’s ridiculous & she’s just tolerating this. foreshadowing!!” the reveal that he’d brought her there knowing she would die would have hit so much harder if she’d been some rando min-wage worker that hoult’s character met while he was trying out different foodie spots, who impulsively agreed to go on the restaurant tour with him because hey, cool food & he’s probably not that dangerous, what’s the worst that could happen?

but if they’d wanted to keep the sex worker angle, i think it would have worked better if they’d cast older actors in those roles. like 40+ maybe -- really lean into the heroine feeling world-weary and jaded like the head chef guy, so their interactions would also have been richer & less paint-by-numbers we’re-the-same villain monologue. also, despite ralph fiennes being a good actor & very convincing as an asshole superstar chef who can bully people into suicide & is murder-happy... I didn’t buy that he was charismatic enough to convince a whole restaurant of people to kill themselves!!! like damn they should have had him die after that one lady did her Me Too bit, and used that to demonstrate that the murder cult vibes persist even if the “genius” at the center of it all doesn’t. letting the restaurant staff give the heroine their sales pitch woulda been more interesting.

also they needed to kill more people before the finale -- and just generally be a lot weirder and grosser. the food stuff was not interesting or weird enough or delicious looking enough. they coulda found better concepts by rifling through scrapped ideas for Hannibal episodes. the smores bit at the end almost got there, but... well... it was like if the ending to Midsommar had whiffed. plus all these characters acting like they meant to go to Olive Garden and accidentally wound up trapped on Weird Conceptual Restaurant Island, and I’m just like “killjoys! eating one single course of one single meal off of salty ocean rocks seems like it would be fun." plus that’s only one flavor of pretentious foodie culture, so the head chef’s whole whine about how he just wants to cook burgers for people who appreciate a good burger is like... bruh this is a very achievable goal. you are already half way to cooking unfussy-yet-tasty food for the mases with your tacos. stop living on a private island and go operate a food truck downtown.

but maybe i’m just bitter about the flop food concepts because i thought whatever they were gonna do with the dead swan would have been more visually interesting and off-putting than just slapping wings on a man in the distance and drowning him. like yes that’s a very bad death and i don’t need to care about someone in order to be appalled by their murder... but in a horror movie, where your audience comes in prepared for character death? put more effort into making me shocked and appalled when people die. none of the rich & doomed characters were despicable or interesting enough for me to care about them. eventually i started feeling bad for the actor’s assistant (and because of her, the actor) and the rich lady with the dead daughter, just to care about something; but by the time i felt anything about those characters, the movie was 2/3rds of the way through & still framed their deaths as a triumph over ignorant, greedy corrupt philistines. i don’t mind this kind of ending in general, but it felt sour & unearned here.

plus the journey there took too long!! like yeah imo there was a lot of wasted potential, but the biggest problem is just that it dragged on and on and on.