The Menu — A Nihilistic Analysis

From the moment I saw the the trailer, I was eagerly waiting for this movie. Lo and behold, today I found it on an OTT. It had all the right elements that I crave for — People in a closed setting with no access to phones, an exotic experience, unhurried process of making beautiful food. (I think I like Hannibal because of his culinary skills mostly and my recent discovery Chhello Show — a watering mouth guaranteed) And of course, intellectual masturbation — Mama Mia!

This post is only Spoilers so read at your own peril.

So what is the story and philosophy of the movie:

12 people goes to an exclusive restaurant run by a decorated chef for an evening of personalised food experience. Now chef doesn’t only makes food, he is after a perfect experience. He is someone for whom cooking for people is a passion and he strive to give them best possible experience. His is a rags to riches story and everything is just perfect in his realm. Until the day he starts realising that he doesn’t love cooking anymore. All that he is doing really hard now - is to please people and seek their approval. People that he is trying to please, mostly don’t understand his art, his food, and may be not don’t even like it. Then he start questioning his choices, he sacrificed so much in his life, lives under a lot of pressure to maintain his reputation everyday, he doesn’t have family or place to call home, Have a mother who is not really proud of him, takes a day off once in few months and all this for the underwhelming nod in superfluous words by self obsessed jerks whose whole reason to buy an insanely expensive dinner, which they neither understands not really relishes, was to get bragging rights and feel accomplished or just “cool”. Our Chef feels like Sisyphus who is rolling the boulder up the mountain everyday just to watch it roll down. At the depth of Nihilism he shares his thoughts with his team, who are facing similar questions — given they are staying on a barran island, with no family or even a private space of their own and seeing their art to come short in comparison to the greatness of our chef — now find the voice for the sinking feeling in their heart which was the meaningless of their lives. “To be, or not to be, that is the question”.

They all get together and plan a masterpiece of a Swan Song — a perfect evening at the end of which, givers and takers, everyone dies. For which handpicked bunch of people are invited, each so attached to the image of their projected self that in the end they readily choose death over giving away this fabricated self image. Now to think about why those 12 people were killed — its sorta meditation on the different forms of “Maya” of “Samsara” which makes us into Monkeys who refuses to open their wrist with treat in it and accept the bondage of having a hand stuck in the treat box.

The Climax is very interesting, when one of them — who was actually not part of the original guest list, just be her authentic self and makes Sisyphus content for a minute, thus manages to escape the hell hole. Everyone sees what she does but given they had realised the meaninglessness of their facade while face to face with death, accept death over opening their monkey wrist. This part is what Honour Killing is, we would rather die / kill than leave the pretence.

The climax is actually a cheeseburger moment for me — in the sense in real life you would never get a bunch of people to have awakening together in one go. It would have been magnificent if there were few who accepted it gracefully and most try copycat tactics. But hey — who am I, just a random jerk who would not let art be as is, would want to find meaning in every little unintended detail.

As I said earlier, Thank You Mark Mylod for intellectual masturbation for the day, I’ll have a good night’s sleep today. Compliments to the chef!