Throughout the night, in increasingly imaginative ways, the chef tells the diners that they chose the wrong man – the wrong world. – To worship. Here's the problem. No one believes what he says.
These diners are used to theater dining rooms and VIP culture. They're used to long, $1,000 fancy dinners and being served by staff who have researched them beforehand and taken detailed notes about their personal and professional lives, preferences and behavior.
They are used to being watched and escorted everywhere they go, including the bathroom. As they were shown around the restaurant grounds, they barely blinked, only to see the workers sleeping together in the crowded barracks. Extreme inequality is striking.
Even before things got violent, “The Menu,” which hit theaters in November and is currently streaming on HBO Max, and “Fresh,” which is currently streaming on Hulu, are horror stories about the twists, distortions, and deceptions of fine dining. It is used and expanded. Sometimes it's necessary to enjoy them.
In “The Menu,” Julian Slowik is a chef at a secluded high-end restaurant, played with a cold, hypnotic severity by Ralph Fiennes, who seems almost in control of his mystery. If you booked Tasting His Menu at his three-star Michelin-starred fine dining restaurant, you'd have the type of people that would surround you at dinner.
This is a trio of interchangeable financial buddies who came here to party, an arrogant restaurant critic who loves to listen to himself talk, and a man who barely wakes up to each other, let alone the sensual experience of eating and eating. That means a couple of old and dull wallets. Drink – food becomes blurred, recedes in real time, disappears from memory before you finish chewing.
Slowik's most ardent fan is the food-obsessed Tyler, played by a shivering, keyed-up Nicholas Hoult. He's so excited about the kind of genius he saw on “Chef's Table” that he can't help but see it everywhere he looks. (David Gelb, who created the show, brings his visual style strokes as a second-unit director.) Anya Taylor-Joy plays Margot, his paid chaperone for the night, a wounded and skeptical man. And I'm about to leave. “You don't have to call him 'chef',” she reminded Tyler, a little disgusted by his deference.
'The Menu' is very cynical about the nature of service and hospitality. Mr. Slowik doesn't see a path forward for himself or fine dining. He divides the world into “givers and takers” and sees the relationship as one of endless, irreparable mutual harm – toxic, twisted, and hopeless. And although he considers himself one of the same group of donors as the workers, he does not sleep in the barracks with them.
Slovik's tasting menus structure the film, acting as a kind of Rorschach test that the characters take and rate course by course, each listening to what he wants in his stories and explanations and giving his ice cream. See what they want in highly manipulated presentations like .
“He's insulting you,” Margot said as the bread course arrived, but there was no actual bread. “No, no, no,” Tyler insists. “He's telling a story!” As it turns out, both are right.
In “The Menu,” the chef is a psychotic authoritarian who commands an army of cooks to carry out his dark vision of moral absolutism and retribution. As a satire, it might have been stronger if the cooks hadn't been left without names, faces, or dialogue. Instead, the film focuses on the increasingly frantic diner, occasionally encouraging the audience to see it from the chef's perspective. He wasn't always a monster! He became one after years of devoting himself to pleasing the rich. Now, like them, he too has become completely numb to the enjoyment of his own work.
Although the characters do not directly address the news, the world outside the island is essentially ours now. The restaurant business is fragile and dysfunctional, abusive chefs like Slowik come and go with sexual assaults, vulnerable workers find the strength to form unions, and meat processing plants We're probably in the midst of a major uproar, with articles about the dangers of the virus making national headlines. But Slowik's analysis in “The Menu” shows that change is impossible. You have to burn out the entire system.
In Mimi Cave's feature debut, Flesh, a woman becomes embroiled in an even more shady business that feeds the rich. Noah, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, is single and has some bad luck on dating apps until she meets a nice guy at the grocery store. Steve, played by Sebastian Stan, is handsome, charming, a great cook, and a doctor.
But he's only pretending to be a doctor. Steve kidnaps women, imprisons them in the basement of his home, and then cuts them up, packages them, and sells them piece by piece in vacuum bags to customers he calls “the 1 percent of the 1 percent.” He is a serial killer who thinks he is a high-class butcher.
There are scenes of nightmarish body horror, but the most mundane and familiar of food images are in some ways even more hideous. When Noah plays with Steve to survive, she is served meatballs in tomato sauce and toast with grainy pâté. The scene where Noah finds out how her meat ended up on his plate and takes a bite while suppressing her disgust is enough to make her stomach hurt. This is the most extreme version of the well-known self-deception.
As a feminist critique of the meat industry, “Fresh” has a dark sense of humor. “Don't stress, it's not good for the flesh,” Steve says as he leaves the victims in their cells. He seems like the type of guy who would casually bring up Carol J. Adams' book, The Sexual Politics of Meat, in a conversation about why he doesn't eat animals, but what he really meant was a cover with a diagram of a butcher. I just remembered it. He had a female body type and looked cool.
The film treats cannibalism as an elite fetish among extremely wealthy men who prey exclusively on women, preferring the meat delivered along with some of their victims' underwear. Like Tyler in “The Menu,” their curiosity is misdirected, but they begin to learn more about their food.
Steve's customers only get cartoonish glimpses, but it's clear they don't want to pretend they don't know the price of what they're eating. They want to know the exploited woman's name and see her photo. The scary thing here is that no matter how awful the price, being able to afford it is what makes the food special.
audio creator Tully Abekasis.
