"The Menu" (2022)

The Menu is often described as a satire of wealth, privilege, and foodie culture, and it certainly is all those things. But beneath the sharp social critique, the film seems to be asking a deeper and much older question: what happens when good things become ultimate things? Or, to use Augustine’s language, what happens when love becomes disordered?

Augustine believed that sin is not usually the love of bad things. More often, it is the love of good things in the wrong order. We take gifts and ask them to do what only God can do. We ask created things to carry the weight of meaning, identity, satisfaction, and transcendence. They cannot hold that weight. They collapse under it. But not before demanding more and more of us in return. That feels like the real world of The Menu.

Food is a good gift. It is one of the most basic human pleasures, meant to nourish us, gather us, delight us, and remind us that we are creatures with bodies and appetites. It can be celebratory, ordinary, sacred, and communal all at once. But at Hawthorn, food has stopped being food. It has become status. It has become identity. It has become theater. It has become a way of proving who belongs and who does not. The guests are not there because they are hungry. Or at least not hungry for food. They are hungry for distinction, access, taste, belonging, and superiority. They want the experience of being the kind of people who can be there. And yet that hunger never gets satisfied.

That is the lie of idolatry. It promises satisfaction but delivers only appetite. It offers fulfillment but creates dependence. It keeps asking for devotion while giving less and less in return. Augustine understood this well when he wrote that the human heart is restless until it rests in God. Human desire itself is not the problem. Desire is part of what it means to be human. The problem is that our desires are too deep to be satisfied by substitutes. We are built to hunger, but our hunger points beyond the meal. When we aim that hunger at created things and expect them to bear the weight of ultimate meaning, they eventually fail us.

That helps explain why the diners at Hawthorn feel so spiritually empty even while surrounded by excess. They are consuming luxury but receiving no nourishment. Every course is exquisite, yet nothing satisfies. Every dish asks for more attention, more admiration, more interpretation. Nothing simply feeds them. The meal becomes increasingly elaborate while becoming less capable of doing the very thing meals are meant to do.

Chef Slowik is trapped in the same distortion. He clearly began with a genuine love of cooking. There was once joy in the craft, joy in creating, joy in feeding people. But over time that gift became an idol. His work ceased to be hospitality and became performance. His artistry became entangled with prestige, bitterness, and the need to be understood. He no longer cooks to serve people but to expose them, condemn them, and force them to see what he sees. In doing so, he becomes consumed by the very thing he once mastered. That too is part of idolatry. We do not merely worship idols. Eventually our idols begin to consume us.

This is why the cheeseburger scene feels like the center of the film. When Margot asks for one, she is not asking for a better dish or a more authentic dish. She is asking for something the entire evening has forgotten, food meant to be eaten. Something ordinary. Something filling. Something made not for performance or applause or status, but for hunger. Slowik recognizes this immediately because, for a moment, he remembers what cooking was for in the first place.

The cheeseburger matters not because it is simple or nostalgic, but because it restores order. Appetite meets provision. Need meets gift. Food becomes food again. It leaves behind the world of spectacle and reenters the world of nourishment. That moment feels almost sacramental, not in a formal theological sense, but in the sense that an ordinary created thing is received for what it is and with gratitude. Because it is no longer being asked to be ultimate, it can become meaningful again without collapsing under impossible expectations.

Margot survives not because she outsmarts the menu, but because she refuses to worship it. She does not mistake the meal for salvation. She refuses to participate in the illusion that this experience can provide transcendence. She asks only to be fed. In doing so, she becomes the only person in the room who receives the gift rightly.

That may be the clearest Christian reading of The Menu. The tragedy of the film is not that wealthy people enjoy expensive food. The tragedy is that everyone in the room has forgotten what food is for. They have taken a gift and made it ultimate. They have mistaken consumption for communion, experience for meaning, taste for transcendence. In doing so, they become trapped in the endless cycle idolatry always creates, where good things promise everything, deliver less than they promise, and still demand more devotion anyway.

The film ends not with satisfaction, but with escape. Yet the final image of Margot eating the cheeseburger quietly on the boat feels like the only moment of peace in the entire story. It is the simplest meal in the film, and the only one that satisfies. That feels like the final irony of The Menu, but also its clearest insight. The things we turn into idols can never satisfy the hunger that drove us to them in the first place. Only when they are returned to their proper place as gifts, rather than gods, can they be received with joy.