Spoilers for The Menu (2022).
Although The Menu reveals something surprising about its heroine mid-way through the movie, the way that this detail informs her character’s fate flies in the face of one infamous horror movie trope. Horror movies have not always been kind to female characters. While Carol Clover famously outlined the Final Girl trope in her seminal work Men, Women, and Chainsaws, female characters who failed to align with a rigid moralistic framework were often brutally killed for their sins. However, horror movies are far from inherently reactionary, and many works in the genre have subverted the idea that sexual liberation is a death sentence for female characters.
In the satirical horror comedy The Menu, Anya Taylor-Joy's character, Margot, is revealed to be an escort midway through the story. However, The Menu movie ending not only lets Margot live, but ends up inverting the sex-equals-death trope when she is the only major character to survive. While The Menu isn't a classical horror movie, the dark satire borrows conventions from the history of the genre in its premise and execution - from its cultish hive-mind villains to its remote, inescapable setting. This makes the characterization of Margot particularly noteworthy, as her demonized profession is part of what leads her to be the lone survivor of The Menu’s eventual climactic massacre.
Why Margot Needed To Survive The Menu
Margot needed to survive The Menu for the movie’s plot to work. As the murderous chef Julian notes early on, the resourceful escort wasn’t intended to be among the guests present at the incredibly expensive, exclusive restaurant that night. Like the Final Girls of Halloween, Friday the 13th, or any classic slasher franchise, Margot was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. However, unlike those characters, Margot is someone whose line of work is at the very least closely linked with sex work, which would make her as an inevitable victim in many horror movies.
Instead, The Menu takes this character revelation in a different direction. Julian’s discovery of Margot’s work leads him to view her as a comrade in arms - a fellow worker who has been exploited by a pitiless system run by the uber-rich patrons of his restaurant. This initially leads Julian to offer Margot an alliance, but she balks when she discovers that even ing Julian’s side won’t result in her life being spared. Eventually, horror movie icon Anya Taylor-Joy character Margot decides to take a third option and asks Julian for a humble cheeseburger; a gesture that reminds him why he loved cooking in the first place, and thus ensures her survival.
Margot's Character Makes The Menu Work
The fact that Margot is an escort gives her insight into Julian’s thankless plight, with the chef feeling he wasted his life serving uncaring, phenomenally rich clients who couldn’t care less about his craft. Margot’s clever final gambit allows Julian to take pride in his work, something that Margot does earlier when she defends her own line of work to the chef. Finally, Margot’s ability to see through Julian’s act and find the real person under his persona comes from her experience in a profession that, like female sexual liberation more broadly, is frequently demonized and mischaracterized, thus indirectly saving the life of The Menu movie heroine.
