The Menu  ★★★½

RALPH Fiennes has great fun with his lead role in the wonderfully black horror comedy The Menu.

He plays celebrity chef Julian Slowick who runs a high-end restaurant with the precision of an SAS unit.

Hawthorne is located on a small, secluded island that can only be reached by boat.

The hand-picked and steadfastly loyal staff also live in the island in basic, dormitory style accommodation.

All the produce is found, grown or raised on the island where Slowick is almost treated as a god.

Nobody enters his seperate living quarters or questions his ultimate authority.

Slowick doesn’t have the charm of a Jamie Oliver or Rick Stein or the knockabout rough edges of a Gordon Ramsay.

He can be somewhat charming, almost effusive, and is certainly passionate about the artistic nature of his creative profession.

But there is something about his character that suggests elements of Voldemort or even Hannibal Lecter are part of his complex persona.

We join a small group of guests who have accepted exclusive access to another wonderfully idiosyncratic meal and night with Slowick and his team.

Slowly it becomes clear that Slowick is going to unleash the menu and experience of their lives.

Apart from Fiennes, there are great performances all round with other standouts being Anya Taylor-Joy as a sceptical outside who wasn’t meant to originally be one of the guests, Nicholas Hault as a foodie nerd and Hong Chau as Slowick’s mysterious Maître de come second-in charge and general enforcer.

The dialogue by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy cleverly sends up the pretensions of the culinary world’s excesses while leading us slowly into Slowick’s dark mind.

It’s great fun and engaging throughout, but don’t forget it is partly a horror film and the blood doth flow on occasions.