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The Toronto International Film Festival 2022 is in full swing, kicking off on Thursday, September 8 with the world premiere of the emotional drama the swimmers. Since then, the festival has been home to big-name film screenings such as the Viola Davis-directed The woman kingthe long-awaited sequel to Blades offSteven Spielberg’s the fablesand more.
Below are short reviews for Glass Onion: A Knife Mysterywritten and directed by Rian Johnson, and The menu, a Searchlight Pictures dark comedy horror that takes place during an exclusive dining experience. Full reviews will be released later, closer to the films’ distribution dates.
Glass Onion: A Knife Mystery
Rian Johnson is back with a star-studded suspense sequel to his blockbuster hit Blades off. In Glass Onion: A Knife Mystery, Detective Benoit Blanc returns to investigate a friend gathering on a private island in Greece. In the truest whodunit way, the group is offbeat and dysfunctional from the get-go, and it’s clear there are some ill-concealed tensions between them before the murder even takes place. Johnson’s sharp script keeps viewers on their toes when things go wrong and the investigation is running at full throttle.
The pros and cons are pretty straightforward: the murder mystery is filled to the brim with celebrity appearances and seemingly nonsensical plot points. Johnson dominates the whodunit movie revival with his fearless wit and dedication to making a fun movie, but given the meticulousness of Blades off, Glass Onion feels a bit like a letdown. He took the aspects that made Blades off unique and increased them by a hundred. In Blades off, the characters felt so natural, they were rich and oblivious, but not showy. They were obnoxious and self-obsessed, yet held together by their awareness of the social sphere around them. These standards are thrown out the window in the sequel that’s full of hyper-cliche characters representing the worst of recent years. Johnson’s script equips Kate Hudson, who plays fallen actress-model Bridie Jay, with multiple racist jokes targeting the Jewish and black community, among others, Dave Bautista plays menimist streamer Duke Cody, and the list goes on.
Speaking of the cast, the great Daniel Craig effortlessly impresses as the detective from the south, Janelle Monae is a scene-stealer, and Edward Norton is obnoxious as the successful start-up bro-slash hippie Miles Bron . Hudson, Kathryn Hahn and Leslie Odom Jr. are underused in their roles, and Odom Jr. takes his lack of depth seriously and shows that he is a Hollywood star in the making. In short, the film lacks the cold, yet cozy atmosphere of Blades off when it’s so intense that the audience is driven into a collective silence—even when they think, “Oh, this is so stupid.”
Rating: 3/5
Glass Onion: A Knife Mystery will have a limited theatrical release in November 2022, ahead of its streaming release on December 23, 2022 on Netflix.
Told more than five, maybe six courses, The menu is a party that will leave its viewers stuffed. Directed by Mark Mylo (succession, Game of Thrones, shameless) with a script by newcomer Seth Reiss and succession writer Will Tracy, the film blurs the line between black comedy and horror in its disruptive and uneasy tale of greed and overconsumption.
Anya Taylor-Joy plays Margot, an outlier from the group of food critics, gourmets and wealthy people who travel to experience the gastronomic experience of world-renowned Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) “The Menu”. The eccentric group travels via small boat to a remote island and is given a tour by the right-hand man of the chef Elsa (Hong Chau). As she guides them around the island, which includes a banned smokehouse and housing for the chefs, the “flu factor” rises. Immediately something is wrong. The atmosphere is very cult-like. The employees call each other “family” (not in a cute, misguided way, but in the manner of Charles Manson) and the chef’s house is put away privately.
The film is a stunning critique of modern food culture, beating the ‘fakes’, take-down critics and conceptual artists, while also offering ‘Great British Bake Off’ breakdowns of the dishes served and mind-numbing tension. It’s a real cast with each actor giving an acceptable performance, but Chau was a standout as Chef Slowik’s confidante who is willing to do anything to aid in his quest for revenge. The menu screams “eat the rich” in its utterly terrifying and “never seen before” horror, but managed to do so subtly, without venturing too far into reading mode.
Rating: 3.5/5
The menu will hit theaters on November 18, 2022.
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