Cannibalism as a culinary fetish has been explored in films as far ranging as Mimi Cave’s Fresh and the Assamese film Aamis. ‘Meat’ in the phonetic Hindi and Sanskrit sound also means ‘beloved’. It is in the fitness of things in Aamis that the bizarre but persuasive exposition on flesh-eating obsessions, that the search for love, or for a ‘meet’, merges into a growing obsession with meat.
In Mimi Cave’s Fresh, Noa who is into online dating meets Steve at the supermarket, ironically at the vegetable counter because as Steve grandly confesses he “doesn’t eat animals” which is technically not incorrect. After the ‘meat-cute the pair is soon seen taking a torrid tumble in the sack and then, aha, Steve dreamily suggests a weekend holiday in the wilderness.
What You Wish For avoids both the date-gone-wrong trope of Fresh and the elaborate ritualization of flesh consumption as a bond for love inAamis. It is neither interested in being a thriller on cannibalism nor does it fetishize human eccentricity. Instead it portrays cannibalism as a thriving underground business. As neat as kosher meat.
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Significantly the hero Ryan(Nick Stahl) is a financially cornered chef. When we first meet Ryan he has newly arrived in a tropical vacation spot to meet a chef friend who in an unexpected move kills himself. Here the dark but not brooding film gets seriously Mark Twain-ish as Ryan takes his dead friend’s place for a high-end dinner party where, well, meat will be served. But no animal will be killed.
The rest of the film follows a trail of blows and betrayals in the most macabre yet proper dinner party ever hosted for an elite gathering.
What gives the film its spatial levity is the quick shifts in mood, from light bantering to savage butchery. Co-ordinating and hosting the demonic dinner is a beautiful woman Imogene(Tamsin Topolski) who can say a line like, ‘We’ve saved the tongue for the desert,’ as though she were addressing a precious delicacy rather than human depravity.
The screenplay doesn’t fight shy of coincidences like the uncle of a man murdered for human flesh in the oven, showing up at the dinner to investigate. Why should it, when serendipity is a sly silhouette in this hunger game?
Matters soon escalate into a grisly climax. But the film ends in a quietly chilling airport-lounge encounter with a stranger who asks Ryan what he does. Tough one to answer.