Did Will Tracy and Seth Reiss watch the documentary Noma, My Perfect Storm, about the award-winning Copenhagen restaurant, before creating The Menu?
Or had the Succession and The New Yorker writers just sat through one too many tense Michelin-starred dinners? We ask because for anyone who has had the fortune of dining in one of these upmarket establishments, The Menu (a new horror drama starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult) rings rather true.
Now the full-length trailer has been released, whetting our appetite for the forthcoming comedy horror.
It’s all perfectly on point. The twelve guests in this exclusive dining experience are taken to a remote island on a boat. The boxy stone-walled restaurant is surrounded by giant glass windows. Everyone in the kitchen is dressed immaculately and they work together like a well-oiled machine.
“Here we are family,” says the host. “We harvest, we ferment, we gel.” Surely, surely the writers saw the documentary.
Taylor-Joy and Hoult play a couple who are eating at the exclusive Hawthorne restaurant. He’s wildly enthusiastic about the whole event, taking pictures of the food and using words like ‘storyteller’ and ‘mouth feel’ as he dines. She’s not as taken.
But as the evening goes on, as well as scenes of exquisitely-crafted dishes, things start to become very sinister, and then shortly after, very bad indeed.
In the trailer, we see someone with a gun, what looks like someone getting their finger cut off and people trying to escape the restaurant. There’s someone being chased through a wood, and in another scene, guests are lined up outside and given a 45-second head start – to flee from being murdered we presume.
Ralph Fiennes is the sadistic head chef Slowik, an arguably perfect casting. The rest of the cast includes Hong Chau (Watchmen, Homecoming), Janet McTeer (Ozark, The White Queen), Judith Light (Ugly Betty), John Leguizamo (The Night Clerk, The Counselor), Aimee Carrero (The Village), Paul Adelstein (Mothers and Daughters) and Arturo Castro (The Terminal List).
Mark Mylod, who has previously worked on Game of Thrones, Shameless and Succession is directing.
Most recently Hoult has been gracing our screens as Emperor Peter III in Hulu’s period-drama The Great, while Taylor-Joy played witch Olga in the Viking epic The Northman.
Speaking about his role choices to the Guardian in 2021, Hoult said, “It’s also fortunate that people don’t know exactly where to put me. If I feel something is too close to what I’ve already done, I’ll try to mix it up.” Seeing him play a foodie turned victim in The Menu certainly falls into this remit.
