The Menu is being sold as a riff on “The Most Dangerous Game,” Richard Connell’s 1924 short story about a wealthy lunatic who hunts a man, trailers highlighting a set piece near the middle of the film in which wealthy diners are let loose in a forest to be tracked down by Julian Slowik’s (Ralph Fiennes) assistant chefs. But this is a brief moment in the movie; The Menu has less in common with The Hunt or Surviving the Game than with this year’s Crimes of the Future or Tár. It’s a pitch-black meditation on the confluence of power, wealth, and taste.
Taste has two senses in The Menu. As the evening’s $1,250-per-diner meal begins, Slowik asks his patrons not to eat their food but to taste it, to savor it, to appreciate the colliding ingredients. But underneath foodie notions of...