Hawthorn isn't really selling dinner. Guests travel to an isolated island and pay an enormous amount of money to surrender themselves to a tightly controlled experience. Every course is announced, every plate carries meaning, and Chef Julian Slowik decides not only what people eat but how they're supposed to understand it.
The longer The Menu continues, the less Hawthorn resembles a workplace and the more it starts resembling a belief system.
Spoilers: detailed film discussionIncludes plot developments and the ending. Open deliberately.
Slowik controls the room before he says anything
The power structure is built into Hawthorn itself. Production designer Ethan Tobman drew on rigid modern architecture as well as religious spaces, and the open kitchen functions as part workplace, part stage and part altar.
Slowik occupies its center.
When he claps, the room responds. The cooks move with extreme precision and almost military discipline. Director Mark Mylod has specifically described the kitchen as a deliberately militarized space, and that decision shapes the entire atmosphere.
These people don't look like coworkers who happen to be exceptionally well trained. They behave like a unit that has surrendered individual identity to a larger purpose.
Slowik isn't simply demanding.
His rules have stopped being negotiable.
Food has become ideology
Fine dining already encourages the idea that a dish can mean more than its ingredients. The Menu takes that concept and pushes it until it becomes absurd.
Every course arrives with a story. The guests aren't merely supposed to eat; they're expected to listen, interpret and be impressed. Slowik is no longer serving dinner so much as presenting an argument in several edible chapters.
The system works because almost everybody accepts it.
The kitchen believes in Slowik's work. Tyler believes with particular enthusiasm. The other guests, at minimum, believe in the status attached to being there.
Even after the evening becomes openly threatening, it takes an astonishing amount of time before some of them admit that what they're witnessing might not simply be an especially aggressive form of performance art.
If you've paid that much for exclusivity, apparently nobody wants to be the first person to ask whether the experience has become a little strange.
Tyler is already converted
Tyler is the perfect disciple because Slowik doesn't need to persuade him.
He arrives fully committed.
He knows techniques, terminology and ingredients, and he desperately wants to demonstrate that he belongs in this world. Yet the thing he cannot understand is that knowing about creativity doesn't make him creative.
His admiration is completely one-sided. Slowik doesn't care how many culinary terms Tyler can identify or how accurately he can describe a technique. Tyler still treats the chef's approval as if it determines his own worth.
Margot is dangerous for exactly the opposite reason.
She doesn't know the rules, but more importantly, she has no emotional investment in respecting them.
That makes her harder to control than somebody who simply disagrees with Slowik. A critic still accepts the system they're criticizing.
Margot never really joins it.
The cheeseburger breaks the spell
The cheeseburger at the end can look almost comically simple compared with everything that came before it. That's precisely why it works.
Margot doesn't ask Slowik for art, meaning or revelation. She asks him to make food for a hungry customer.
That reaches back to a version of cooking that existed before Hawthorn became an ideology. Someone is hungry, someone makes something good, and the customer enjoys it.
No manifesto is required.
No moral judgment arrives on a stone plate that probably has its own insurance policy.
For a brief moment, Slowik becomes a cook again rather than a guru.
Hawthorn only works while everyone believes in Hawthorn
That's the cult-like structure at the center of the film.
Slowik's staff believes in him. Tyler worships him. The wealthy diners believe in exclusivity, and Slowik has increasingly started believing in the absolute importance of his own role.
Margot doesn't escape because she understands the ritual better than everyone else.
She escapes because she recognizes that it is a ritual and refuses the part assigned to her.
That's the weakness in Hawthorn's perfect system.
Absolute control works beautifully until somebody decides they'd rather have a cheeseburger.