Delicious Review
Director: Nele Mueller-Stofen
Date Created: 2025-03-08 14:32
1.5
Delicious Review: Directed by Nele Mueller-Stofen, Delicious is a French-German drama starring Fahri Yardim as John, Valerie Pachner as Esther, Carla Díaz as Teodora, Naila Schuberth as Alba, Caspar Hoffmann as Philipp, Julien De Saint Jean as Lucien and others.
The story follows a privileged German family spending their summer in Provence, France. Their seemingly quiet holiday takes a dark turn when John, in a state of mild inebriation, runs over a young woman named Teodora. In fear of being sued, the family decides to cover up the accident instead of reporting it. But when Teodora comes back, not to pursue justice but to be their housemaid, things go haywire into a psychological game of manipulation and control. What might have been a biting and disturbing critique of class division becomes instead an infuriating and muddled failure.
Delicious Review
Netflix’s Delicious creates an intriguing situation, an upscale family struggling desperately to hide their faults, with the woman they’ve wronged demanding her way back into their lives. There is an initial tension, and the film has one wondering it is going for an all-out psychological thriller.
But then, the movie bungles its own message. Rather than present a strong critique of privilege, Delicious opts to make its wealthy heroes human while treating Teodora and her entourage as if they are cartoonish villains. The movie attempts to be an insightful social commentary, but it utterly fails to do so by reducing the working-class struggle into a contrived plot point.
At no time does Delicious feel like it gets the actual dynamics of wealth disparity. It wishes to discuss class struggle but does so in a manner that ends up empathizing with the privileged more. The movie appears more interested in the way the rich feel when faced with their guilt than with the actuality of what becomes of the people they hurt.
One of my biggest problems with Delicious is its failure to fully explore the power imbalance between the rich and the poor. Instead of acknowledging the real injustice—John and Esther using their privilege to escape consequences—the movie shifts focus to making Teodora seem like an opportunist. It boils the story down to a “bad things come when you let the wrong people in” fairy tale instead of exploring the more profound, meaningful themes it is trying to discuss.
How the film portrays Teodora and her friends is especially infuriating. Instead of making them more than one-dimensional, they are portrayed as conniving and nefarious, making it difficult to actually root for them. Meanwhile, the upper-class family—who ought to be the true villains—are endowed with complexity that makes them appear to be victims of their own error. This unbalanced presentation undermines the power of the film and renders it a flawed social commentary effort.
Visually, the Delicious movie is glossy. Frank Griebe’s camerawork emphasizes the disparity between the family’s sumptuous summer home and the darkness lurking beneath their behavior. The Provence sunlit landscapes are a chilling contrast, and Volker Bertelmann and Ben Winkler’s music tries reasonably well to create tension. All these technical aspects, though, are more superficial appearance than anything of substance as a storytelling device.
There isn’t actually any emotional depth to the way the film tells its story. It feels like the director was more interested in Delicious being slick than in making sure that its message stuck. The end result is a film that may be visually pleasing but not heavy enough to leave anyone with anything lasting.
The actors try their best with what they have, but the script doesn’t exactly play to their strengths. Fahri Yardim is good in making John’s moral failings believable, and Valerie Pachner is good at making Esther calculating and infuriating. Carla Díaz as Teodora is mysterious, but her character is so poorly developed that it’s difficult to really care about her. The same can be said of the supporting cast—the rest of it delivers solid performances, but none of them are given enough meat to work with.
Summing Up
French-German drama Delicious is a tone-deaf and infuriating mess. It attempts to examine class conflict but ends up empathizing with the elite while stereotyping the working class. The film’s slick cinematography and good performances can’t compensate for its failure to deliver any true depth or even a coherent message. It’s neither exciting nor stimulating—it’s just disappointing.
2025 Delicious film is now streaming on Netflix.
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