Hunger Review: A Culinary Thriller Without Any Thrills
Hunger is brilliant in some ways, but leaves you with an expectation that is never fulfilled.
HUNGER REVIEW SCORE
Netflix‘s new Thai film Hunger is likely to leave you wanting, unless you’re part of a very specific audience. While visually the film highlights the talent of director Sitisiri Mongkolsiri, you keep expecting it to become the thriller it bills itself as. But in the end the only thing that makes Hunger a thriller is that it uses the tense music score of a thriller and its tone is deadly serious.
The young, penniless, but brilliant fry cook Aoy (Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying) is recruited to work for famous Chef Paul (Nopachai Jayanama) who cooks for rich socialites, generals, and bros riding high on crypto. Paul is the embodiment of the culinary genius who can smell all your ingredients from a mile away, but takes pride in verbally and physically abusing his employees. He sees something special about Aoy immediately, but treats her with no less cruelty than he does any of his other subordinates.
Early in Hunger Aoy does whatever she can to prove herself to Chef Paul, including enduring cooking oil burns up and down her arms while perfecting a special fry dish. Paul’s mistreatment of his employees never lets up, and eventually he pushes Aoy too far. Their relationship changes from one between teacher and student into a rivalry.
The biggest problem with Hunger is that it feels and looks and sounds like a thriller, which keeps you wondering when you’re going to find out what’s “really” going on with the stone-faced Chef Paul. Is his business a front for drug smugglers? Does all the meat secretly come from the corpses of sous chefs who didn’t live up to his expectations?
Will Aoy ultimately prove to be better than Chef Paul, leading the latter to corner his protege in a bell tower where they’ll fight a desperate battle to the death with cleavers?
And no, no one of those things will happen. They just keep cooking, with Hunger culminating in a very public battle between Aoy of Chef Paul: a battle of… cooking.
Ever see one those genre remix videos; when someone will edit a movie trailer to make it seem like an entirely different film? Like Mrs. Doubtfire as a psychological thriller or, my personal favorite, Se7en as a romantic comedy? That’s what I kept thinking of while watching Hunger.
Plot-wise, everything about Hunger seems like a movie we’ve all seen many times, just with a different tone. We’ve seen it as a romantic comedy, a dramedy, and even as a rock ‘n’ roll biopic. It’s difficult to recognize that and then take the material as seriously as the filmmaker wants us to.
What makes Hunger not a dramedy is the music and the fact that whenever Aoy is cooking, or Chef Paul is simply existing, their faces are composed of the same kind of dead-eyed violence that could make you believe they were frying up the remains of their downstairs neighbors.
But the stakes are far too low for most of us to share the characters’ obsessive passion. There might be an audience made up of foodies and those working in the culinary industry who would strongly and understandably disagree, but otherwise the appeal is limited.
Jayanama is great as the coldhearted Chef Paul of Hunger who, even in his own PR, smiles as much as Kanye West, but there’s little that’s particularly novel or surprising about him. We’ve seen so many Rocco Dispiritos and Gordon Ramsays on reality series, that it would almost be disappointing to be confronted with a high profile chef who isn’t an unapologetic jerk. Sure, Chef Paul goes a bit beyond Ramsay’s viral “Idiot Sandwich” abuse, but only by inches.
Visually, Hunger is gorgeous and Sitisiri Mongkolsiri is brilliant at telling novels’ worth of story without words. But plot-wise Hunger is a long episode of Hell’s Kitchen that eventually makes way for an episode of Iron Chef. And if you don’t go into the experience without knowing that, then you’re going to feel cheated.
Knowing all that, if you still want to check out the Thai thriller Hunger, it’s streaming right now on Netflix.
