Once again I’m not a foodie so I hardly need much convincing that avant-garde haute cuisine is a ripe subject matter for mockery. Still, this exceeded my every expectation in how perfectly crafted it was and as I suspected would be the case, my wife was riveted too. The increasingly pretentiousness of the menu is expected and so too is the pivot to full on horror. What I didn’t expect is how it managed to work in passable backstories for all of the diners and tie everything together so well. It’s fantastic as comedy and a send-up of food culture and honestly one of the better all round films I’ve seen recently.

Margot Mills is accompanying her date Tyler Ledford on an exclusive dining experience at Hawthorn, run by celebrity chef Julian Slowik. There are only a total of twelve guests and there is a boat that takes to them to Slowik’s private island. The restaurant’s maître d’hôtel, Elsa, welcomes the guests but notes that Margot wasn’t on the guest list so Tyler awkwardly explains that his original guest couldn’t make it. Then she takes the guests on a tour of the island that shows both how they harvest food from the environment around them and how the staff are absolutely loyal to Slowik. The dining experience begins with Slowik himself exhorting the guests not to just eat but to savor each course. He introduces each course with an increasingly outlandish monologue and the courses themselves are similarly weird. For example for what would normally be bread with seasonings, he provides only the seasonings and no bread. When the restaurant distributes tortillas that are laser-printed with the personal secrets of each guest and many of them connected to Slowik in some way, everyone starts to realize that they are part of an elaborate revenge plan.

What makes this film work and so much fun is how plausible the restaurant and Slowik’s courses are. Obviously this is a highly exaggerated version of Noma and other similarly famous top restaurants so the language used to describe the courses, with the grandiose allusions to deep meaning and spirituality, feels right. It sounds ridiculous but a stunt that begins with giving a speech about the importance of bread in human history and ends with not giving the very rich and powerful guests any bread is just about at the edge of plausibility. Then there is the wonderful selection of guests, the food critic who asserts perfect familiarity with what Slowik is trying to convey and finds fault in everything, Tyler who is the enthusiastic superfan, the elderly rich billionaire who doesn’t care about food at all but is there simply because it’s the world’s best restaurant and so on. The writing is impeccable and the humor is on point. It’s hilarious to watch Tyler keep eating food or be upset out of missing some of the experiences when he already knows that everyone there is going to die.

One of the most fascinating aspects is that the diners don’t really try to fight back. The Doylist reason of course is that it would ruin the power dynamics and turn it into an action movie, which we don’t want. But Slowik does comment on it and the Watsonian reason is that the diners represent the moneyed classes who are too used to having things done for them and too loathe to break the rules of polite society to actually initiate violence. That doesn’t really fit with what we know from real life but in the context of the film, it’s another layer of the theme setting the service workers against the elites that they serve. Slowik is still an evil monster of course and it doesn’t make sense why so many of his staff would go along with his plan. Still it’s always great when the filmmakers think things through and work out plausible motivations for many different characters.

I haven’t watched anything by director Mark Mylod before and the rest of the filmography doesn’t look that impressive. I’m more inclined to give the credit here to the writers Seth Reiss and Will Tracy for such a rich script with so many characters and having everything fit together so well. This film isn’t that scary if that is what you expect out of horror but it is certainly humorous and it has so much fun mocking haute cuisine. Highly recommended.