Reviewed by Alicia Glass
Somewhere in the back alleyways and secret places of Vietnam, there lies a very special diner. Open all day and all night, the chef of the diner is always here and ready to grant the customers’ wish with a plate of beautifully, if not ironically, prepared food. But with a granted wish comes a warning – regardless of whether or not you like the outcome, once the food is consumed and the wish granted, your soul is now indebted to the chef, who holds it in trust for the glowing green soul orbs of the Devils Diner itself.
One other door, boasting an awe-inspiring carving of the devil and the various stages of existence on its face, occupies the main room of the diner, and never fails to fascinate diner patrons. The chef will invite you to try and go through the door, but most patrons are already dastardly and can’t get past the devils face and eyes boring into them. The patrons leaning more towards a relatively innocent slant shouldn’t be in the diner in the first place, and the chef does try to talk them out of having his food, much to the diners wall-shaking ire.
Each episode, the chef prepares a carefully curated dish for the patrons wish, and while it’s likely just Moxie’s Western sensibilities, the names at least sound disgusting. But each dish overflows with meaning and irony, and the chef always at least plates as beautifully as he can manage, quite possibly because the chefs own heart bleeds for some of these misguided patrons. Some, but not all.
Every episode carries a sin and a dish, and to start off, of course we begin with Greed and the rather messy Blood Pudding. A man scrabbling for money, having made a few bad business deals to try and gather the funds for the IVF treatments his wife so desperately wants, resorts to a dark and hungry secret in a box the diner chef gave him. He soon finds out that while his own blood supply may be finite, Greed is a never-ending open maw.
Episode 2 gives us Pride and Goat Tongue Sate, which is gross in so many different ways. A young man trying to get a promising career and his saucy little fiance around the loud opinions of his overbearing mother, visits the diner for a magic fix. Instead, he finds himself literally in his mothers shoes, making things worse as he tries to fix what his mother originally broke with her constant harping complaints. This one is a real tongue-lasher, right up to the highly cynical end.
Snake Wine is the dish offered with Episode 3 sin, Anger, and this particular episode managed to get both Moxie’s empathy and rage boiling, more or less at the same time. A father whose teenage son is an gifted aspiring photographer is exploring his sexuality, and soon after his nervous confession of being gay to his compassionate father, who does nothing but embrace his son and his choices in warmth and love, the young artist turns up dead. His father is absolutely heartbroken, but more than that, he is understandably enraged. The schoolmates who bullied his son for being gay, the parents who encouraged such violent and homophobic behavior, and the schoolteachers who determinedly knew and saw and did nothing about the whole sorry affair, are all targets of the fathers venomous wrath. But while venting his righteous fury with the help of some magic from the diner, father realizes that perhaps he had the wrong target all along, and his violent vengeance won’t bring his gentle son back from the dead.
It’s the birthday of the young man main character in Episode 4, Delusion, and all he wants are the Candied Gooseberries his beloved mother, who died on his birthday when he was a child years ago, used to make for him. His life as a grown man is a mess, living in one-room squalor with a barely-held construction job and a re-re-re-used bag of glue to huff in his pocket, he blames himself for causing his mothers death so long ago. A consultation with the chef in the diner promises a chance to go back in time and fix things, but at a very heavy cost, ten whole years per one candied gooseberry. Which effectively means that our delusional main has perhaps three whole chances to go back in time and fix things with his dearly departed mother, before the diner claims him into a glowing green orb for eternity.
Episode 5, Suspicion, is perhaps the saddest of the set, and laced with irony throughout, especially when the two main characters keep throwing up heart pieces from the Heart Porridge dish the chef prepared for them. We have a nerdy lonely fella, who meets a very gregarious woman who works in a bar, and they somehow hit it off like they were fated to be together. Despite sharing dreams, adventures in plane watching in the middle of traffic, and a love of turtles, our destined pair both experience odd spots of memory loss and harbor suspicions against each-others’ faithfulness. When it turns out they’ve both separately been to the diner chef for a magical cure, and return together to try and make a new bargain to redeem what’s left of their love, the diner chef is genuinely saddened for his part in their tragedy, and the fact that, no, there is little else he can do to help. He can, however, offer one chance that thus far he hasn’t given to any other diner patron we’ve seen, to our doomed pair – they can both choose to go through the door with the devils face on it.
And finally, we end our stories appropriately enough with Karma, the story of the current diner chef himself, and his terrible delicacy of Moon-Faced Snails. The diner chef tells us that the worst sin anyone can commit is murder of either ones’ children or parents, and somehow, through some seriously misguided actions, he actually managed to do both in one fell swoop.
The diner chef loved his chain-smoking wood-carving horrendously-in-debt father beyond all reason, and when his father is facing death from a long bout with cancer, the diner chef turns to the diner chef-before-him to try to bargain for a magical cure. But the cost of his own sons’ sanity and life turns out to be too much to bear, and the Devil in the diner always takes his due, usually by insisting the one in hideous debt be the one to replace the current diner chef. That’s some seriously shocking generational horror y’all. Especially when the mother from the Pride episode, after months of tongue and movement therapy, shows back up at the diner for a rather final, and completely ironic, showdown with the current diner chef.
They don’t make horror anthologies like these much anymore, and while tons of great horror from various flavors of Asian countries has come out over the last decade, most of it isn’t Vietnamese, so this show is an extra surprise delight. Full of wonderful practical FX, gallons of fake blood, and deliciously ironic storytelling so thick you could eat it with a spoon, Devil’s Diner is a show to be savored down to every last bite, on Netflix now!