This post isn't a review of the film but rather a deep dive into its philosophy in relation to Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy". If you're here for the rating and review, feel free to ask in the comment section.

The Italian poet "Dante Alighieri" imagined Hell as a remote place filled with tormentors and sinners, while "Purgatory" is a small isolated island surrounded by water, with a vibrant forest that symbolizes the paradise of faith on earth, and only certain people who are cast by fate on the shore of the island in order to purify them from their sins and rise to eternal peace.

Dante wrote his epic, which was called "The Divine Comedy", and it became one of the most famous literary works in history during the fourteenth century AD, during his presence in exile away from his home city Florence between the year 1302 AD and his death in 1321 AD.

Dante's epic consisted of three parts: Hell (Inferno), Purgatorio, and Paradise (Paradiso), but it was not just a literary work or a mystical religious book as it carried clear political messages.

In the play, Dante put all his political opponents at the bottom of hell, and made them taste all kinds of torment, then set their bodies on fire, and so did the English director "Mark Milwood" and the writers "Will Tracy" and "Seth Reese" when they set fire, not only in the bodies of the heroes of their film but in the culture of consumerism.

Just just as Dante saw the sinners passing through all the layers or stages of purgatory and ascending to paradise, the movie “The Menu” showed us the stages of purification from the sins of perfection, consumption and greed, in preparation for the final transition: complete annihilation.

Hawthorn... From Hell to Philosophy

Name: The Menu (2022): Can Comedy Cleanse Us?
Item: The Menu
Author: @amirtheawesome1

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say What was this forest savage, rough, and stern, Which in the very thought renews the fear.

Opening lines of Dante's Divine Comedy

The movie "The Menu" begins with Tyler - one of those obsessed with restaurants and food - taking his girlfriend "Margot" on a date in one of the most prestigious restaurants ever, a restaurant located on a secluded and remote island, and only the wealthy of society enter and those who are willing to pay a sum of money exorbitant, in order for them to obtain the experience of feeling arrogant and superior as a member of the elite and wealthy society.

On this particular day, Chef "Slowik", the chef of the "Hawthorn" restaurant, one of the most famous chefs in the world (in the film), prepared the list of those present and invited very accurately, and he prepared a menu for them exclusively for this day, as a journey to purify them and then transport them from hell to the yard, and the list of invitees consisted of a wealthy couple, a movie actor and his assistant, and three small businessmen from Silicon Valley, a food critic with an obsessive boyfriend, plus Tyler and his new girlfriend who wasn't on the guest list and therefore wasn't part of Chef's show or menu.

Then the show began with the chef presenting his meal menu, but the chef's menu and his program appeared as part of Dante's journey in purgatory within his famous epic "Divine Comedy".

They lost the ability to think, comprehend, and understand, and all those whose hearts were corroded by envy, miserliness, greed, and greed, all of these fell into hell, and also fell from the account of the authors of the movie "The Menu", and the elite remained represented in those able to perceive and understand who chose betrayal or lies or cheating with their awareness of that, and they walked after vanity, fame, and obsession with their instincts and selves, and these are the ones the "Chef" brought to purify them and society from them, just as Dante brought their counterparts to the island of purgatory in his epic.

However, the authors of the film wanted to begin purification from the staff of the restaurant itself, as happened to Dante in his epic when he encountered at the beginning of his journey three terrible monsters, a leopard, a lion and a wolf, symbolizing lust, pride and greed, and they are monsters that soon prevent Dante from climbing the mountain of purgatory.

The context of purification from these three sins can be understood in the scenes in which one of Chef's staff confessed to the sin of envy and shot himself, then the scene in which the chef himself confessed to the sin of lust towards one of his staff workers, who took revenge by sticking scissors in one of his thighs, and finally the scene of the sin of pride committed by the restaurant lounge administrator, the punishment was to implicate her in a confrontation to death.

In the face of the demons of gluttony

If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.

The Divine Comedy: Purgatory, Poem Sixteen

In one of the interviews of the writer "Will Tracy" with the newspaper "Above the Line" the man admitted that he had gone through a real situation that was the reason for writing the story of the film, he said

I went to a restaurant in Norway on an island. It’s kind of like in the film. We took a boat out and it was just only, maybe, 12-15 customers. We were given a tour of the island. I’m a bit of a claustrophobic, nervous person and I’m in a foreign country, and it was dark on the boat ride, and on an island, what if something goes wrong? I immediately started to become a bit paranoid but also immediately sensed — sometimes when you are in a situation like that, you should pay attention to like, ‘oh, would this be something interesting to write about if it’s making you have these very extreme feelings?’

I did say to my wife that this would be a good, at least, precinct for a story. I kind of just told that basic idea to Seth. We’re old friends and writing partners. Seth kind of came back with all these ideas for people [who] could be that way. With the structure, we kind of went back and forth and kind of came up with a menu-structured film called The Menu.

What was frightening about the Norwegian restaurant was not only the isolated and dark island, but also the style of the restaurant itself, according to the author, as telling stories while eating is part of the style and culture of the restaurant, which makes the feeling of claustrophobic double, as if the guests were being held hostage for hours.

The authors reformulated the film's story to be similar to that adventure, except that they combined the story with another philosophical dimension. In the film, the "chef" meals revealed memories of every sin committed by his wealthy guests, after he denied them eating bread, as if he was denying them the "forgiveness" that he symbolizes "Communion" according to the Christian faith.

Just as Dante came in his epic from hell to purgatory in order to see the sinners purified by torment from their sins, the authors of the film brought their characters to an island similar to purgatory as Dante envisioned them in order to purify them with torment and fire.

Dante envisioned "Purgatory" as seven layers, and through the meals and scenes that permeated it, the film showed a journey of purification from vanity, envy, laziness, gluttony, miserliness, anger and lust, which are the seven sins that Dante presented in his epic.

The film began with the owner of the restaurant who was drowned by the "chef" in the ocean, and ended with the fire that he ignited in everyone , as if it were Dante's punishment in the twenty-sixth cantata, and the seventh class of purgatory concerned with the sin of envy.

Can comedy cleanse us?

Abandon hope all ye who enter here

Phrase read by Dante at the Gates of Hell

Dante Alighieri lived in the Republic of Florence, and his works contributed to laying the modern foundations of the Italian language. It was a literary color specific to the upper class of society. As for the comedy, on the contrary, it was usually written in a colloquial language that was understandable to the general public. It also began with a painful beginning and ended with a happy ending. Therefore, Dante's epic was classified under the "comedy" section, but it was an epic "comedy" depicting man's journey from hell to paradise, passing through purgatory.

Likewise, the makers of the movie "The Menu" wanted to present another kind of comedy, a comedy that does not share comedy except in its name, just like Dante's comedy, as the film directed a harsh criticism of contemporary consumption culture, which is manifested in the style of luxury restaurants with its exotic and expensive foods.

This forces its staff to work under deadly pressure in order to rise to the level of perfection expected by the restaurant's elite and wealthy customers, while these customers and that elite are nothing but a group of thieves, manipulators and maniacs, who came to satisfy the desires of their egos and the whims of their obsession as portrayed in the movie.

But unlike the Divine Comedy, the end of that comedy was not happy. Rather, it ended with a holocaust, from which only "Margot" survived, who refused to eat the food of the rich since the events of the film began, and contented herself with ordering the famous and simple American meal "Cheeseburger" for an amount that did not exceed 10 dollars. She took her burger and left on the boat.

In Conclusion

Ordering a cheeseburger or get rid of all the rich? What the film presented is just a fictional image that carries at the same time an explicit ideological message against consumer culture. However, the film presented revenge and purification as salvation, and it is the same belief that Europe carried for centuries, and it only led to more blood and destruction.