“Something very special” hides behind the silver door in Mark Mylod’s The Menu, yet the film never clarified exactly what. Anya Taylor-Joy and Ralph Fiennes lead this intriguing dark comedy thriller as Margot and Chef Julian Slowik, respectively. Slowik is a world-renowned chef, known for creating extraordinary dining experiences, and this one is far from an exception. He’s become a hollow shell void of his old passion for cooking, and he’s looking to make those he holds responsible pay. The Menu satirizes how food relates to elitism and how consumerism bastardizes art leaving it devoid of any true love or devotion despite its pleasurable appearance.
The Menu is among the new movies and tv shows now on HBO Max and is certainly an entertaining and complex thriller. As the film progressed, Slowik purposefully reveals more and more of his backstory, motivations, and quirks. By the film’s ending, things are laid out quite plainly, yet there are some remaining unanswered questions. A big one would be what Slowik whispered to Nicholas Hoult’s Tyler to make him kill himself. Another relates to the mysterious silver door Taylor-Joy’s Margot notices at the restaurant, and how it relates to the same door in Slowik’s private residence.
Is What’s Behind The Restaurant’s Silver Door The Same As In Chef Slowik’s House?
When allowed to venture outside the restaurant, The Menu’s protagonist, Margot chooses to learn a bit more about their culinary captor. Not even his most trusted employee, Elsa, is allowed in Slowik’s house. She goes in to discover it’s a carbon copy of the restaurant, including the special silver door. After a fight that ends with Elsa stabbed in the neck, Margot learns what’s behind that door – a room dedicated to Slowik’s past featuring restaurant reviews, pictures of a former family, and a picture of him happy as a fry cook in a fast-food restaurant. That discovery is what helps her guarantee her freedom later on.
While the two silver doors are purposefully identical, logically, it wouldn’t make sense that the same thing lies behind the door in the restaurant. Intriguingly, like the other doors in the restaurant, it was unlocked and Margot probably could’ve opened it. Perhaps it was just another exit or given a potential cannibalistic interpretation of the ending, it could be a horrific storage locker for human meat. Most likely, however, despite Elsa’s declaration that “something very special” is hidden behind it, it’s nothing truly important given the context. If it was important or housed something valuable, it would’ve been integrated more into the film.
The restaurant’s silver door is presumably a set-up that didn’t need resolving. Its narrative purpose was to give Margot the inclination that she should go through the same door at Slowik’s residence to discover “something very special.” As such, the restaurant’s door wasn’t opened by Margot nor any of the other guests as the question of what it hides wasn’t necessary to the true mystery of The Menu. It unfolds as the film progresses that it would be about how and why these guests would die and whether Margot would survive too – cleverly playing with classic horror tropes by revealing her truth midway through the Menu.
Lillian, the illustrious food critic, describes the culinary experience at a Slowik restaurant saying, “He’s not just a chef. He’s a storyteller. The game is trying to guess what the overarching theme of the entire meal is going to be.” That’s what the real mystery in The Menu is – not what Slowik is hiding behind an ornate silver door, but rather what he had planned next for his special guests and why. He answered that and though this query might persist, its unanswered nature doesn’t make The Menu any less decadently entertaining.
