REVIEW | Ralph Fiennes is in particularly fine form in the deliciously twisted delight of a film The Menu

A young couple joins a group of society's wealthiest and most pretentious at an exclusive restaurant on a remote island for a once-in-a-lifetime menu specially prepared for them by a world-renowned chef. What awaits them, though, is nothing that any of them could have expected.

The Menu is one of those films where the less you know going in, the better your experience will be, so I will be treading especially carefully here and will do my best not to ruin any of the many twisted delights on offer. That said, if you don't want to read any further, let me just say that this is very much a movie that stars Anya Taylor-Joy. It easily earns its R-rating despite not having too much explicit gore, only some bad language, and no sex and nudity whatsoever. It's a total blast as long as your sense of humour runs on the dark side. Get the picture? Good. Now, go see it.

For those of you still with me – and I promise not to reveal anything that hasn't been revealed in the trailer – The Menu is something of a mix of a psychological thriller with pitch-black social satire. Fans of Midsommar, Squid Game, Get Out, or Triangle of Sadness will eat it all up with a relish unreserved for the kind of measly-portioned fine dining depicted in the film.

The social satire revolves around a particular form of class warfare, as you may have guessed just by the premise of the film. And though the originality of the film itself doesn't exactly extend to its fairly familiar targets, it's not quite as obvious or as simplistic as it could easily have been. Thanks to some strong character work – especially on the parts of Anya Taylor-Joy's sceptical heroine, Margot; Nicholas Hoult's increasingly... let's say, "odd" foodie, and Margot's date for the evening, Tyler; and, of course, Ralph Fiennes' severe, clearly unhinged Chef – and a decidedly heightened sense of reality, it may not have anything massively profound to say, but what it does say, it says with deliciously acerbic relish.

This isn't exactly surprising, though, when you consider that director Mark Mylod is a veteran TV director of Game of Thrones, Shameless, and - most pertinently – Succession. Writers Seth Reiss and Will Tracy made their name on the legendary satirical "news" show, the Onion, before working extensively on Late Night With Seth Meyers and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, respectively. Frankly, with that kind of pedigree behind it, it would have been surprising if the film wasn't as sharp and as funny as it turned out to be.  

And yet, Mylod's work on Game of Thrones also clearly helped give the film a cinematic sheen, despite 90% of the film taking place in a single location. Big set pieces of the film are the (admittedly beautifully captured) sort of conceptual, haute cuisine dishes that you might find on snobbier Food Channel programmes. There's also something beautifully measured about the way the film balances its large ensemble cast of excellent "character-actors", including the likes of Judith Light, John Leguizamo, and Hong Chau, between the twin poles of Taylor-Joy's Margot and Fiennes' Chef Slowik.

Though one is clearly the hero of the film and the other the villain, a large part of the success of the film comes from the interplay between two characters who are both diametrical opposites of one another while also being shockingly similar to one another too. Their cat-and-mouse game is made a thousand times more interesting by the underlying sympathies the two have for each other, and you could barely ask for two better actors to bring these characters to life.

From her remarkable debut in the Witch (which never hit our cinemas, by the way, but is a total must for horror fans) through unforgettable lead roles in off-kilter, cult classics like Last Night in Soho and a decidedly anarchic take on Jane Austen in Emma, Anya Taylor-Joy has already established herself alongside the likes of Florence Pugh and Mia Goth as one of the most dependably exciting actors of her generation, and she brings all of that to bear on her character here. Fiennes, meanwhile, has been excellent for decades, but he's in particularly fine form here with a performance that seems to be pitched at exactly the half-way point between Lord Voldemort and his character in the Grand Budapest Hotel.

I would go for an exceptionally obvious metaphor here, using some sort of dessert food that isn't exactly nutritious and is the perfect mix of decadent sweetness with a tart edge, but I'm not enough of a foodie to figure out exactly what that dessert is. Instead, I'll just say that The Menu is a perfectly cooked, deliciously evil delight of a film that definitely won't be to everyone's tastes, but if it's your sort of dish at all, you're all but guaranteed to love every minute of it.

WATCH THE TRAILER HERE: