Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Delicious’ on Netflix, An Eat-the-Rich Sort-of-Satire With a Screamingly Obvious Message

Delicious (now on Netflix) starts as one movie and ends a completely different one, leaping genre boundaries not totally unexpectedly, because, yes, we noticed those little hints being dropped here and there – and I’ll say no more lest the spoiler cops filet and grill me like fresh salmon. Actress-turned-filmmaker Nele Mueller-Stofen (notably married to Conclave director Edward Berger) writes and directs her first feature, a German production tackling the class disparity that’s been a hot topic in film lately, from Triangle of Sadness to Saltburn and many, many others. So it’s not a question of relevance, but whether its approach to crafting a metaphor for the one percent/99 percent dynamic is artful, or even functional.

DELICIOUS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Nobody in this shitty family knows why these French streets are filled with rioting protesters. They’re in a car driven by a guy they paid to drive them, and for obvious reasons, he knows what’s going on – these working-class people are angry about inflation and their subpar wages, he shares with the father, John (Fahri Yardim) who reassures the kids, teenager Philipp (Caspar Hoffmann) and his younger sister Alba (Naila Schuberth), that they don’t need to worry because the windows are bulletproof. As the muted sounds of explosions and sirens and shouting surround the car, Esther (Valerie Pachner) laments from the passenger seat that they should’ve taken their little bubble on a different route to their summer vacation home in the French countryside, which we soon learn is her parents’ sprawling, gated manse with a massive pool, tennis court and roughly a dozen fainting couches, but I can’t be sure about that, because I lost count.

Esther’s job is Big and Important enough that her attempts to ignore phone calls while on holiday are feeble. John also tries to shut out whatever problems the scientific community has with his academic research paper. So at least these people work jobs instead of living lives of leisure, right? Sure. They go out to dinner at a nearby hotel restaurant and John has one extra cocktail and drives the fam home in the dark and there’s a little bump and he screeches the Jag to a halt – and there alongside the road is a woman, looking dazed. John jumps out to help her. She’s bleeding. John and Esther know they should take her to the hospital, but he was drinking, and then driving, and the scrutiny of authorities is something they’d rather avoid, so they risk the health of this woman – she might have internal injuries, Esther says, although her concern soon evaporates like a drop of Diet Mountain Dew in the Gobi – and take her back to the house.

The woman is Teodora (Carla Diaz). This isn’t the first time we’ve met her. No, there were scenes earlier that cut away from our protag family’s pillowy privilege and showed Teodora and a crew of friends cleaning rooms at the hotel, with one of them taking a big swig from a bottle of booze, replacing the liquid with his urine and putting the bottle back on the cart for some poor rich bastard to sip. We also see one of them intentionally gash Teodora on the arm, so we know her “injury” was staged. Hmm. Curious. Now, back to the aftermath of the “accident”: Esther bandages Teodora’s arm and tidies a bed in the guest room for her. Esther leaves 320 bucks on the table and when everyone gets up the next morning Teodora and the money are gone. “It’s a lot of money – for her,” Esther justifies. 

Just as Esther and John breathe a sigh of relief, Teodora returns. Shit. She tells them that she lost her job because of her injury and can’t afford her rent so can she stay here and help with the housekeeping until she gets on her feet? She can cook and everything. Esther and John buy this feeble-ass story, because they literally buy everything rimshot! And so Teodora worms her way in, effing with little Alva’s head, taking selfies with an obviously smitten Philipp and gaining Esther and John’s confidence by getting them one-on-one and listening to their various woes. This all fits nicely with whatever diabolical scheme Teodora has cooked up – a diabolical scheme that better be clever and dramatically impactful and not some gigantic dumbass metaphor that’s as subtle as Godzilla kicking down your front door to give you a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet. Fingers crossed. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Parasite is the big one, but the messy obviousness of Saltburn is a closer comparison. Other big ones I shan’t reveal lest we spoil the twist that you’ll probably see coming, but hey, I’ve gotta hedge my bets with this stuff.

Performance Worth Watching: Diaz’s work here is confident and layered, maintaining the ominous portent of the subtext of her performance, beneath an earnest facade. 

Memorable Dialogue: Fun exchange:

Esther: I have no right to be unhappy. I have a fantastic life – a good job, money, family. 

Teodora: Everyone has the right to be unhappy.

Sex and Skin: Just a couple scenes that the old monthly HBO cable guide would’ve called “sexual situations.”

Our Take: No thank you, Mr. Zilla, but we’re already committed to a religion. Thematically, Mueller-Stofen wields a Little Tikes Count-and-Learn Hammer like a sledge, hoping to boldly smash genre barriers with slow-building suspense leading to a SHOCKING third-act reveal. Fear not: Your jaw will stay safely off the floor. In fact, it’s likely to remain clenched in slight annoyance as you shake your head and roll your eyes. Delicious is a haves-vs.-have-nots tale that feels like one eat-the-rich metaphor too many, possibly because it’s big and dumb, Baby Hueying into your living room to smash the china cabinet with its ass and scare the cats into the basement and knock the sofa out of its comfy little carpet divots. HEY, it roars at us, THE GAP BETWEEN SOCIOECONOMIC CLASSES KEEPS GETTING WIDER, AND IT SUCKS.

It’s easy to draw comparison between Diaz’s spirited performance and that of Barry Koeghan’s in Saltburn, which was at least audacious and witheringly funny in its depiction of loathsome people navigating plot-hole-riddled improbabilities. Although Delicious succumbs to similar tonal incongruities – is it satire? Straight-up comedy? Something to be taken seriously? – it more egregiously toys with us, trying to maintain a grim poker face as it builds to an altogether ridiculous conclusion hampered by big viscous wads of nonsense. And it’s not like we don’t see it coming, either.

Mueller-Stofen assuredly develops a sense of time, place and general domestic unease, and reminds us that we don’t need to love, like or even relate to any characters in a movie in order to feel involved with their stories. The film’s biggest issue is the characters, who lack the depth to justify their actions, and are essentially straw dummies propped up to do the plot’s bidding and fulfill the filmmaker’s threadbare thematic ambitions. Mueller-Stofen makes some effort to provoke her audience through Teodora’s devious interactions with the various family members, and Diaz ably holds our attention in those moments, compelling us to believe them despite the film’s transparent overtures. The story leads to a rather messy conclusion, by design for sure, but in terms of delivering a message, it’s remarkably tidy, simplistic and underwhelming. Some might even call it tasteless, he said with a wink.

Our Call: Not every movie with thematic intent can tell us something we don’t already know. But the better ones execute their schemes with style and nuance, two things Delicious ultimately lacks. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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