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A little over a month since hitting theaters, “The Menu” is now being served for at-home streaming. The Anya Taylor-Joy thriller is now streaming on HBO Max.
The dark comedy is produced by Adam McKay and directed by Mark Mylod, and it follows a couple named Margot and Tyler (played by Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult) on a high-end dining experience at a secluded, very exclusive restaurant that soon turns deadly. Like many of McCay and Mylod’s projects (Mylod directed 13 episodes of “Succession,” of which McKay is an executive producer) the films serves as a pointed satire of the upper class as it focuses on the head chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) who becomes so consumed by the hyper-competitive restaurant industry that he loses sight of why he fell in love with food in the first place.
“‘The Menu’ is a black comedy, but one played close to the bone,” wrote Variety chief film critic Owen Gleiberman in his review of the film. “And it is a thriller, because after a while what’s being served to the diners segues from pretentious to dangerous. Even the danger becomes a form of snobbery: This is how much the food matters. Yet the tasty joke of ‘The Menu’ is that the food doesn’t matter at all. The food is an abstraction, an idea, all generated to fulfill some beyond-the-beyond notion of perfection that has little to do with sustenance or pleasure and everything to do with the vanity of those who are creating the food and those who are consuming it.”
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Stream “The Menu” on HBO Max today.
