How ‘The Menu’ Joins the Charcuterie Board of Films About the Deadly Sins

'The Menu', stars Anya Taylor Joy and Ralph Fiennes, among others.

A poster for The Menu.

(Photo Courtesy: IMDb)

The Menu, directed by Mark Mylod, starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Ralph Fiennes, is part horror, part dark comedy, and thought-provoking satire. In the film, chef Julian Slowik (Fiennes), handpicks a group of guests to experience a night of the epitome of fine-dining at his high-end establishment Hawthorne. 

As time passes, the night turns sinister with each guest now facing risk of death. The Menu is an obvious satire about class divide and the restaurant industry.

A still from The Menu.

The food served to the guests, for the most part, is not merely for ‘eating’. It is meant to be consumed as a novelty. The Menu, in this effort, joins a list of films that use the seven deadly sins as flaws in their protagonists. 

‘Our Menu is Too Precious to Eat’: Chef Slowik

Slowik asks one thing of his guests, “Do not eat,” he prays, “Taste. Savour. Relish. Consider a morsel which you place inside your mouth. Be mindful. Do not eat. Our menu is too precious for that.”

Notably, the seven deadly sins can’t be taken at face value without pairing them with the saying, ‘Too much of anything is good for nothing’. So, all of Slowik’s guests have been picked because they have ‘too much’.

How many people can afford to spend more than $1000 each (approx. Rs 81,621) on one dinner? 

A still from The Menu.

The sins Slowik represents are rather straightforward – pride and wrath. Slowik sees his culinary creations as revolutionary creations above everyone else’s and views his own menu as something that cannot be altered or tampered with. His wrath is directed inwards and outwards. 

He feels rage at Tyler for ‘taking the magic away from cooking’ because of his self-proclaimed expertise in the kitchen because he’s a ‘foodie’. He is clearly furious at his guests, he is mad at his former angel investor, and he is angry at himself for having benefited from the same culture he is now critiquing. 

A Critic’s Critic and Her ‘Yes Man’

Two other guests at the Hawthorne are Janet McTeer as a famous food critic Lillian Bloom and her editor Ted (Paul Adelstein). Lillian exhibits pride but in a different form than Slowik.

If Slowik’s pride lies in his creations, Lillian’s lies in her understanding of creations like Slowik’s.

A still from The Menu.

The issue doesn’t lie with her being a critic but instead lies in her holier-than-thou presence. Accompanying her is Ted, who could be understood to represent ‘lust’ but not in the obvious sense. Ted, like Tyler, lusts after approval. While Tyler struggles to get noticed by Slowik, Ted plays a ‘yes man’ to Lillian. 

‘The Menu’ and The Wolf (of Wall Street) 

When it comes to greed (or more accurately covetousness), every uber-rich person in the dining room is perhaps guilty. Most so, are the three ‘tech-bros’, Soren (Arturo Castro), Bryce (Rob Yang), and Dave (Mark St. Cyr). All of them are embezzling funds from their company, as simple as that. To drive the point home, Slowik prints their bank statements on their food.

A still from The Wolf of Wall Street,

One film that perfectly emulates the dangers of excessive greed is The Wolf of Wall Street. Martin Scorsese’s award-winning film is based on the memoir of the same name by Jordan Belfort. The film follows the story of a man who comes up with a fraudulent but successful scheme in stocks and enjoys his riches till he flies too close to the sun.

Of ‘The Menu’ and Food

A film to refer to for ‘gluttony’ is WALL-E. While the film follows the endearing story of two adorable robots, the humans in the film are portrayed as creatures who, in their gluttony, have rendered their own planet uninhabitable. 

In The Menu, gluttony manifests itself in the literal sense, with Tyler. Even as Slowik starts eliminating guests in a gruesome fashion, Tyler remains seated and continues to eat each dish presented to him.

He buys into all of Hawthorne’s hyper-intellectualism, consuming each arriving dish with increased fervor. 

A twist reveal at the end also shows how much Tyler was willing to sacrifice for his seat at Hawthorne. Tyler is an embodiment of several other sins as well – he is envious of everyone who catches Slowik’s eye and his hubris lies in his supposed cooking skills (and his Pacojet).

A still from The Menu.

The understanding of ‘sloth’ is not as in-your-face as the rest. Understanding sloth as the desire for ease makes everything that exudes luxury, a part of ‘sloth’.

When Slowik clearly demarcates his kitchen into his guests and his chefs, and when he talks about how his uber-rich guests won’t be served bread, it all speaks of sloth. 

It all culminates in Slowik asking his guests, "Why didn't you fight harder to get away?"

Sloth finds itself more directly interpreted in the film The Big Lebowski. The film was a box office flop when it released but has since then become a cult classic, owing perhaps to the fact that people couldn’t earlier get on board with the Dude, a sloth-like protagonist, actually being someone to root for. 

A still from The Big Lebowski. 

That, has changed. Because over the years, many have discussed that the ‘sins’ are all basic human characteristics.

It must be noted that the seven sins can also be found in Slowik’s team of chefs. Elsa (Hong Chau), the maitre d’ and Slowik’s right-hand person experiences a moment of envy and lets it drive her to violence. Sous chef Jeremy was lustful and envious of Slowik’s success and lifestyle but has now come to regret it. And so on, and so forth.

However, their inclusion in the story serves a bigger purpose. The idea of complete moral supremacy viz a viz the seven deadly ‘sins’ is also a privilege, one that is often afforded only to the rich.

Therefore, Slowik’s majorly non-white, working class crew is more part of the critique than it is of the problem. 

The Menu, as a whole, is a criticism of class divide but is also one of how people treat the working class. It does miss out opportunities to critique racism and misogyny (though it attempts to through a scene wherein one of Slowik’s chefs attacks him after he reveals that he tried to ruin her career purely because she refused his sexual advances). 

As the credits roll, you might find yourself feeling uncomfortable or even self-righteous and that’s exactly how the film wants you to feel. Because it isn’t just critiquing the people at Hawthorne, The (meticulously crafted) Menu is posing questions for all of us.