Delicious

Bluesky

A piece of film-festival wisdom teaches us that, if we can’t avoid French films at Cannes, we should at least try to do so with German ones at Berlinale and Italian ones at Venice. Of course, there are exceptions to the “rule”, but still. However, the “boycott” of the German film Delicious that premiered less than a month ago at Berlinale’s Panorama by the key outlets was probably not rooted in that piece of wisdom, but in a simple fact that it was scheduled for a Netflix release early in March.

Delicious is the feature-length directorial debut by the actress Nele Mueller-Stöfen whose best known film roles are connected to the work of her husband Edward Berger, whose stable career path took a steep surge with the international hits All Is Quiet on the Western Front (2022) and Conclave (2024). Theoretically, Delicious follows the path of the recently popular “eat the rich” movies by using a trope of a stranger being invited into the rich family’s privacy only to expose it as rotten inside. But does it bring anything new to the table, pun intended?

The family of four consists of a “mater familias” Esther (Valerie Pachner, glimpsed in Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life), her meek husband John (Fahri Yardim) who tries to keep up with her career success and their two kids, Philipp (Caspar Hoffmann) and Alba (Naila Schuberth). They come from Frankfurt and plan to spend vacation at Esther’s parents’ villa in the south of France. Although they vacation there every summer, they still feel like fish out of water, which is obvious from the opening scene when their car gets stuck in the middle of the street protests that threaten to turn violent.

Enter the “intruder”. She is Theodora (Carla Díaz), the young Spanish woman who works in the local hotel. After John assumes that he hit her with the car while driving under the influence of alcohol, Esther takes things in her own hands, treats her wound and offers her to sleep in the guestroom for a night, since the proper medical intervention at a hospital would bring some unwanted publicity to the vacationing family. Next evening, Theodora turns up again with a story that she lost her job, pleading for a deal to stay at the villa as a maid until she finds another one, which she gets.

As expected, she starts playing games and pitting family members against one another, revealing the cracks in the couple’s seemingly perfect relationship and the kids’ perfectly decent and civil upbringing. However, Theodora is not a solo player, but a member of a larger group of hotel employees whose “game” is way more sinister and deadly than weaving the web of intrigue to tear the family apart.

While it operates on the level of a basic intrigue-powered, household-bound thriller-drama, Delicious holds on despite some clunky dialogues in Mueller-Stöfen’s script. Her directing skills are slightly above her writing, so she manages to squeeze solid performances from actors and to infuse the run of the mill story with some dense and tense atmosphere set against the backdrop of the overall slickness of Frank Griebe’s cinematography. The fluid editing by Andreas Wodraschke and the discreet enough score by Volker Bertelmann and Ben Winkler also help a bit.

The problem is that Mueller-Stöfen puts all her chips on the one final plot twist that should serve as the great revelation and theoretically pave the way for hammering the point. The trouble is that it would be highly predictable, even without phoning it early on, which the filmmaker does, of course, so it does not play out as a revelation, but as a lame attempt of a shocker, revealing the banality of the point in all of its “glory”. Even the most naive among the viewers will soon sense that they are being played and that Mueller-Stöfen is bluffing, so eventually both the filmmaker and her work could only hide behind its “socially conscious”, revolution-celebrating banal point.

Eventually, when it comes to people, both rich and poor, the ugly culinary truth is that they are simply not delicious. And when the script is undercooked while the banal point is not seasoned with some humour or genuine shock or thrill, the film is simply unsavoury. Delicious does not live up to its title...