Delicious (2025)
Directed by: Nele Mueller-Stöfen
Premise: A wealthy German family visits their summer home in France. They take in a lower-class woman (Carla Díaz) who becomes the family’s live-in maid. But things aren’t quite what they seem.
What Works: Delicious is a slow burn thriller with political implications. The story is founded on a formula seen in films such as The Hand That Rocks the Cradle in which an outsider insinuates themselves into a family and becomes a source of division. That set up mostly works in Delicious. Carla Díaz plays a hotel worker who is taken in by the wealthy family and Díaz plays this just right. Her character adjusts her affect from one audience to the next, playing to the family’s insecurities and tensions. The domestic conflict is well dramatized. The marriage between the parents is breaking down due to professional shortcomings and personal failures and Díaz’s character exacerbates those cracks, masterminding situations that lead the characters where she wants them to go. The class politics of Delicious have some complexity. The wealthy family members are not necessarily innocent victims but the filmmakers concoct some fear for their well-being on the viewer’s part. The maid and her fellow service workers don’t get much characterization but they are economic underdogs. Delicious has an interesting combination of conflicting sympathies that don’t allow for easy identification with one group or the other.
What Doesn’t: More than any other film, the scenario of Delicious most closely resembles 2019’s Parasite. In fact, there is quite a lot of Parasite in Delicious but this film is not as good or as interesting. The politics are much more obvious in Delicious but not in a way that makes it bolder or more incisive. The story literalizes the popular slogan “Eat the rich.” This is not handled well. Cannibalism, when it is presented thoughtfully, can pose provocative questions about what it means to be civilized and who is regarded as a person as opposed to food. The filmmakers of Delicious fumble the cannibalism concept. It is introduced late and does not fit with the tone of the rest of the picture. The cannibalism is also indicative of the way the class politics of Delicious are mishandled. We live at a time of exacerbating economic inequality. The filmmakers seem to recognize that but the way the idea is presented here—making the underclass the predators—comes across tone deaf, inconsistent, and confused. The movie ultimately doesn’t say much.
Disc extras: Available on Netflix.
Bottom Line: Delicious is at best uneven. The filmmakers aspire to do something more complex than a binary conflict and there are some interesting ideas here but they across incomplete. Delicious plays as a Parasite knockoff made by people who didn’t understand Bong Joon Ho’s film.
Episode: #1053 (June 22, 2025)