The Menu – Chef welcomes you to culinary hell in grisly comedy

The diners are convinced that they are heading off for the finest of fine-dining experiences. The reality is that pretty much the only dish they are going to get is revenge served very cold. And the interest for us, in the comfy seats, is working out what on earth is going on and why in this consistently intriguing and occasionally laugh-out-loud comedy horror.

Masterminding the night is the chef, excellent from Ralph Fiennes as he mixes a strange gentle sadness with ghastly cruelty, always with a weary superiority and detachment. Chef runs a super-elite restaurant on a super-elite island, a band of cooks operating under him with military precision. The trouble for everyone, though, is that chef is really rather displeased. The latest batch of diners catch the boat with expectations high of a night of culinary exclusivity. The only exclusivity is that the horror is targeted precisely for each of them. This is the Great British Bake-Off gone very, very wrong. Paul Hollywood’s hauteur is nothing compared to chef’s as the night nosedives. It’s cleverly done as things start to take a sinister turn. The tortillas are painfully revealing – for the guests. On them are pictures illustrating their misdemeanours from fraud to infidelity, from over-adulation to a trashing of reputations. Then it starts to get really nasty. Fingers fly. The men get the chance to escape while probably dimly suspecting that they haven’t got a hope in chef’s hell. And when help apparently comes, well, it’s the cruellest blow of all.

And why? That’s the fun in the film. Chef is mightily hacked off (rather like the finger) as the whole thing starts to seem to cast itself as a satire on greed and on all the huge snobbery which attaches itself to cooking these days. Yep, all those ludicrous show-stoppers that no one would ever want to make or eat, you might say. But what strikes most is the weariness with which chef turns the tables. If he is attacking the greed and the daft expectations, then he is attacking the world that his industry has fostered and encouraged. If the diners have ruined his art, then you could argue that he has acquiesced in their doing so.

There are some pretty vicious circles going on here – and chef makes it very clear pretty early on that he is expecting no one to get out alive. Most of the diners are fairly sketchily delivered, but among them the stand-out is Anya Taylor-Joy, the diner there under an alias, a woman who might, chef suspects, be cut from the same cloth as he is.

There is something awfully Agatha Christie about this island trip where a group of variously culpable people are forced to face the consequences and their comeuppance, but it is Christie with the most modern of twists – and plenty of ambiguity. You can discuss its finer meanings in the car all the way home and you still won’t get to the end of it. It’s a tasty offering, one to savour in the most ghastly way. As a film, it’s really rather delicious, beautifully shot, extremely well acted and just the right mix of layers, tastes and nuances to win it the grisliest of star baker awards.