The Menu: The Last Supper is a ferociously clever and viscerally unsettling sequel that transplants the original’s haute cuisine critique into the grease-stained, neon-soaked heart of mass consumption culture. Director Mark Mylod returns with a sharper, meaner blade, dissecting not the elitism of the fine dining world, but the terrifying, democratic gluttony of fast-food obsession. The premise is a stroke of genius: a secretive, once-a-year pop-up that promises the ultimate “unlimited” feast to a select group of food influencers, burger historians, and competitive eaters. Clad in golden tickets and armed with ring lights, they are the new priesthood of consumption, led by Anya Taylor-Joy’s magnetic, ruthless influencer queen—a character born from viral slop tutorials, now hungry for legitimizing exclusivity. Nicholas Hoult is perfectly cast as her sycophantic documentarian, his earlier foodie pretension replaced by a grotesque, streaming-era fervor. The film’s first act masterfully builds a queasy tension, not from silence, but from the cacophony of crinkling wrappers, frantic chewing, and the incessant ping of live-stream notifications, as mountains of perfect, synthetic-looking food ascend toward the fluorescent lights.

The horror, when it curdles, is both spectacularly grotesque and lethally pointed. The “special sauce” turning a profound, metallic red is just the first hint. The film unveils its central, brilliant terror: the concept of “closing the loop.” In this kitchen, waste is the ultimate sin, and the guests—who have built careers on consuming content and product without consequence—are now the only ethically sourced ingredient left. The meals become recursive and personalized: a blogger who made her name criticizing chain meat patties is served a suspiciously familiar-looking slider; a fry connoisseur is presented with a basket of perfectly golden, twitching tendrils. The satire here is razor-sharp, targeting a culture where consumption is an identity, yet the reality of that consumption—the labor, the sourcing, the physical cost—is meticulously filtered out. The neon-lit restaurant becomes a prison of their own desires, a hellscape where every demand for more, for hotter, for cheesier, is fulfilled with a literal, horrific generosity.

At its core, The Last Supper is a blistering exploration of karma in a late-capitalist world. The charismatic chef, a ghost from the original film’s universe, is not a classically trained artiste but a former franchise fry cook who saw the truth in the grease vat. His vengeance is not on the rich, but on the perpetually hungry—those who consume without thought, who turn sustenance into spectacle, and who have made the entire world feel as cheap and disposable as a value meal. Anya Taylor-Joy’s journey from queen of the feast to its potential centerpiece is a breathtaking arc of survival and monstrous awakening. The final act descends into a chaos that is both darkly comedic and deeply disturbing, as the guests must decide whether to play the game of consumption to its ultimate, cannibalistic conclusion or find a way to break the cycle. The film posits that in a society built on empty calories and emptier content, we have all signed an invisible contract where we are both consumer and consumed. The Menu: The Last Supper is a triumph of modern horror—a film that will make you flinch at the smell of frying oil and question every like, every share, every bite. It’s a devastating reminder: when you live your life as if everything is a product, you shouldn’t be surprised when you finally end up on the shelf.

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