The Kitchen review: "A startling vision of the future troublingly close to our present"

The Kitchen had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival. Here’s our review...

Recent years have seen Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya voicing the Ghost of Christmas Past in a film version of A Christmas Carol and playing Bill Sikes in an audiobook of Oliver Twist. It’s perhaps understandable, then, that there are aspects of both in the script he co-wrote (with Joe Murtagh) for The Kitchen, in which a Scrooge-like curmudgeon vies with a Fagin-esque gang leader for the allegiance of an orphan who’s fallen on, ahem, Hard Times.

There the Dickens parallels end though, to be replaced by shades of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley: writers whose dystopian depictions of futuristic societies get a vivid complement in the bleak vision of 2040 London Kaluuya and co-helmer Kibwe Tavares have created for their directorial feature debut. 

In the metropolis to come, gleaming apartment blocks in the sky offer a life of antiseptic isolation to those who can afford it. Those who can’t have ‘The Kitchen’: a decaying commune of higgledy-piggledy social housing whose proud residents live in poverty under relentless government surveillance.

Izi (Kane Robinson) has had enough of police raids and water shortages, and has his eyes set on a one-bed apartment in swanky Buena Vida. Just when he thinks he’s out, however, something pulls him back in: youthful Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman), an ex-girlfriend’s kid who, having lost his mum, is in danger of being drawn into the violent insurgency that local Robin Hood Staples (Hope Ikpoku Jr.) is waging against the authorities.

It’s a straightforward morality story at heart, reminiscent at times of A Bronx Tale and with a sagacious neighbourhood DJ (played, rather fabulously, by ex-footballer Ian Wright) cut from the same cloth as Do the Right Thing’s Mister Señor Love Daddy. Yet it is such a stunningly and meticulously designed film that it continually captivates. Tavares draws on his background as an architect to show both the sterility of gentrification and the glorious dysfunction of that which it would eradicate. 

One inspired flourish sees London’s brutalist Barbican Centre become a hi-tech funeral home, while other scenes in the Kitchen find an ingenious new use for the shuttered HMP Holloway. In Robinson, meanwhile, we surely have tomorrow’s leading man, the Top Boy star exuding a potent charisma in a film that could potentially do to his career what Get Out did for Kaluuya’s. 

The Kitchen will be released on Netflix at a date to be confirmed.