Film
Delicatessen
- Comedy
- Strange
Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's rusted-brown fable is set in a starving post-apocalyptic tenement where the butcher downstairs supplies suspiciously abundant meat. It plays out like silent comedy staged inside a nightmare, with sound design doing half the joke-telling. Watch it for texture, rhythm, and invention rather than plot logic; it's for people who like their whimsy with a genuine edge of menace.
Should you watch it?
Watch it if you love a grimy, rain-soaked dystopia where the gags are as inventive as the sets, and you don't mind your comedy turning a little sour at the edges.
Skip it if you're squeamish about gore and crude bodily humour, since the grotesque side is played for laughs and can feel relentless across its ninety-nine minutes.
What it asks of you: A brisk ninety-nine minutes, but it rewards close attention: background gags arrive as fast as foreground ones, and the tone lurches without warning.
Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.
If you liked this
Amélie2001
If Delicatessen's warmth appealed more than its horror, this is the same director minus the cannibalism — pure whimsy, a lonely Parisian waitress fixing strangers' lives with mischief and colour.
But Jeunet's gone soft here; the anarchic menace and grotesque humour are almost entirely traded for sweetness.
The City of Lost Children1995
Jeunet and Caro's very next film, built from the same junkyard aesthetic but pushed further into fantasy — cloned brothers, a strongman, a girl chasing a kidnapped boy.
But Even stranger and more scattered than Delicatessen; some find it gorgeous nonsense rather than a story.
Brazil1985
Terry Gilliam's bureaucratic nightmare shares the rusted, overstuffed production design and the trick of making authoritarian misery genuinely funny before it isn't.
But Longer and angrier, with a note of real despair that Delicatessen mostly keeps at arm's length.
Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Delicatessen
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
Freaks1932
Delicatessen's tenement is full of 'monstrous' eccentrics played for both laughs and sympathy; Freaks did that trick first, sixty years earlier, treating its community as heroic rather than horrifying.
Tod Browning's carnival drama cast real sideshow performers and asked audiences to find their humanity before punishing the 'normal' people who exploit them — grotesque comedy with a real sting in the tail.
But Decades old and stiff by modern acting standards, and its use of real disabled performers as spectacle sits uneasily today.
More like this (8)
The Grand Budapest Hotel2014
Wes Anderson's confectionery violence — a fussy concierge, a stolen painting, murder played with farce timing — scratches the same itch for stylised, handmade absurdity.
But Cleaner and cuter throughout; nothing here has Delicatessen's grubby, lived-in menace.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street2007
A barber, a baker, and a very efficient supply chain for meat pies — Burton's musical goes straight at the joke Delicatessen only implies.
But It's a full-throated musical with real blood; the singing and the gore might both be more than you bargained for.
Snowpiercer2013
A train instead of a tenement, but the same premise underneath — a closed, starving society where what's on the menu is a secret worth killing over.
But Plays its class warfare straight and brutal rather than for laughs; the tone is grim where Delicatessen is playful.
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover1989
Peter Greenaway's stylised restaurant-set revenge tale shares Delicatessen's habit of putting appetite and cruelty on the same plate, shot like a moving painting.
But Genuinely nasty and slow-building where Delicatessen is quick and cartoonish — this one means to disturb, not delight.
Eraserhead1977
David Lynch's industrial fever dream has the same clanking, sound-heavy atmosphere and the sense of domestic life gone quietly, ominously wrong.
But No jokes to soften it — this is horror-adjacent surrealism with none of Delicatessen's comic relief.
Micmacs2009
Jeunet years later, still obsessed with junk-heap gadgetry and a ragtag found family, this time aimed at the arms trade instead of a butcher shop.
But Softer satire, more Rube Goldberg caper than dark comedy; the bite of Delicatessen has been filed down.
The Triplets of Belleville2003
Same French tradition of physical, visual comedy over dialogue, the same love of odd bodies and clattering sound design that makes Delicatessen work as pure sensation.
A nearly wordless French animated chase film with rubbery, grotesque character design and a plot fuelled by appetite and kidnapping — comedy carried entirely by sound and movement.
But Almost no dialogue and a deliberately ugly-beautiful style; it asks patience rather than offering easy charm.
Ravenous1999
Takes Delicatessen's central joke — a community quietly eating its own — and plays it as gory Western horror instead of a French fable, same appetite, opposite register.
A cavalry officer stumbles into a snowbound outpost where the food problem turns out to be the other guests — pitch-black horror-comedy about hunger that goes all the way where Delicatessen only winks.
But Genuinely gory and unsettling rather than whimsical; the laughs are much darker and harder-won.
People
Cast
Dominique PinonLouison
Marie-Laure DougnacJulie Clapet
Jean-Claude DreyfusClapet
Karin ViardMademoiselle Plusse
Ticky HolgadoMarcel Tapioca- Pascal BenezechTried to Escape
- Edith KerGrandmother
RufusRobert Kube
Jacques MathouRoger Kube
Chick OrtegaPostman
Jean-François PerrierGeorges Interligator
Silvie LagunaAurore Interligator
Directing
- Jean-Pierre JeunetDirector
- Marc CaroDirector
- Aruna VilliersScript Supervisor
Writing
- Gilles AdrienScreenplay
- Jean-Pierre JeunetScreenplay
- Marc CaroScreenplay
Production
- Pierre-Jacques BénichouCasting
- Claudie OssardProducer
Recommended by
Brazil, Amélie, Beetlejuice, The Lobster, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Hot Pursuit, The Ice Pirates, Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra, 9, Micmacs, Raising Arizona, Revolution, Xala, The Visitors, King of Hearts, Ishtar, Eat the Rich, The Mexican, My Best Friend, The New Barbarians, Captive Women, Drowning by Numbers, The Last Days, Eversmile New Jersey, The Princess, Santa Claus Is a Stinker