What we have for you...just for the halibut...is a social satire amuse-bouche, with an umami flavored profile. It's called "The Menu," prepared for you tonight by Mark Mylod, cook du jour--less Cordon bleu than short order--maker of overwrought, serial melodramas ("Succession" feh!), the bill of fare of those who prefer to eat in front of the flat-screen.

Once the stuff of sustenance, food is now the pretense of tattooed millennials who approach cuisine like athletes going for Olympic gold medals. It's difficult not to be snobby about it, since, after all, food is art, and art is subjective, but also tasty. For this we must thank Escoffier; before he elevated food to art, it was just chow for the hoi polloi. For the record, "The Menu" is not a work of art; although Mylod directs with all the posturing of one. His intention, I guess, is for audiences to eat first with their eyes. Too bad the meal he serves isn't up to Escoffier's standards, nor those of the great Luis Bunuel, who raised high dining to the epitome of social satire (for comparison see "Exterminating Angel" and "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie"). In these masterpieces, Bunuel skewered European aristocracy. In his deft hands, they come across guileless, perverted, amoral, savage, idle, and bored. But they could also be compared to the egocentric, moneyed class of the current age, mindlessly yielding to their appetites for sex, material objects, and food--not just food, but cuisine. (See a better take on the hypocrisy of the upper class, for pure fun: Ruben Ostlund's "Triangle of Sadness.")

Bunuel was a director who delighted in surprising audiences--really fooling them, forcing them to question their perceptions. His cinematic tricks could be mean--sometimes, as when dreams collapse into dreams about dreams, confounding audiences, to the point of frustration--but this was for him the joy of film-making. And that's what's precisely missing from Mylod's movie. It appears to be composed by a director compelled to satisfy the same base appetites as those of his characters (evidenced by the ending--simply indulgent). In this instance, he is the one confused and confounded, convinced his screenplay is a scathing rebuke of social classes. It's not. At best, it's a middling comedy, with dialogue that presumes to be clever. It's not. In the hands of the screenwriters (yes, there's two), lame passes for smart and crisp, trite, for sharp-witted. By far, however, the worst offense in this waste of calories is the bewildering last course. So don't bother to save room for dessert.

Whatever joy there is to be found here, it's in the performances of Ralph Fiennes as the chef, whose themed restaurant uses food as a Rorschach, and Anya Taylor-Joy as his adversary, a sort of dinner crasher. What passes for humor is reserved for them, alone--they lunge and parry with abandon, chewing up the scenery like any good students of the Hormel school of acting. Since his movie debut, Fiennes has always looked possessed by that Nazi he played, but here he's also peculiar (that's not a criticism). It's too bad his break out performance is now.

In the supporting cast: Nicholas Hoult (his eyebrows precede him), Hong Chau (peculiar, too), Janet McTeer (needs a new agent), John Leguizamo (channeling Nicholas Cage's career), and Judith Light (wasted). These are all stock characters (Light is called "wife") right out of "How Not to Write a Screenplay." This material is what passes for brilliance and originality today, which most people eat up with spoons--but not everyone is famished, thankfully. They can see through the espuma, get to the meat of things, and take what they find with a grain of salt. But, a bit more salt, please. This dish is under seasoned.