The Cook (Richard Bohringer) is head chef at an exclusive restaurant. The Thief (Michael Gambon), a vulgar and crude gangster, owns the restaurant and holds his court there. His Wife (Helen Mirren) is repulsed by his excesses and seeks physical and intellectual stimulation from her Lover (Alan Howard).

Over the course of a week the Wife and her Lover use the rest-rooms for their clandestine meetings, while the Thief goes through the Cook's menu and abuses all around him. Eventually he finds out about his Wife's affair and proclaims that he is going to kill and eat her Lover.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is a typical Greenaway exercise in intellectual formalism and extreme physicality - this unusual mix securing its status as probably the only art-house cannibal film.

The main themes of the film are also typically Greenaway - sex, death, decay and body as text. Of special note is the way in which he uses long tracking shots from one end of the restaurant to the other as a metaphor for the movement of food through the digestive system. Greenaway also plays on the division between the public and private zones of the restaurant, using changes in costume and lighting to highlight the way in which all this elegant food (the dining room) has an inelegant beginning (the kitchen) and end (the toilet).

As usual for a Greenaway film everything looks or sounds amazing, with fine production design, cinematography, Jean-Paul Gaultier costumes, and an instantly recognisable Michael Nyman score. The performances, from Tim Roth's henchman to Mirren's classy moll to Gambon's repulsive Thatcherite gangster are impressive with the exception of Bohringer, who seems to have difficulties with the language at times.