The Kitchen

After proving his mettle on the long-running crime series Top Boy, Kane Robinson (more widely known as Kano) provides an impressively assured debut offering as the focal point of a full-length feature. In fact, Netflix’s The Kitchen acts as something of a launching pad for a smorgasbord of talent. Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya support each other through their respective feature directorial debuts, while the film introduces Jedaiah Bannerman, who grasps at the opportunity with an equally self-assured display as Benji, a recently orphaned boy taken under the wing of Izi (Kano).

The titular estate is the canvas for Kaluuya and Tavares’s vision, one of the many social housing estates that have been abolished in a dystopian realisation of near-future London. The residents are therefore illegal squatters in the eyes of the totalitarian police state, which enforces its regime with an iron fist in the form of regular and violent raids.

It’s a meagre existence, survived only through the commission of rations and an iron-clad sense of community. Ian Wright makes a pleasant cameo as Lord Kitchener, the estate’s resident DJ, evoking the morale-boosting aura of Do The Right Thing’s Mister Señor Love Daddy. His repeated aphorism of “they can’t beat we” penetrates to the heart of the film’s ode to communal resistance.

Kaluuya and Tavares’s metropolitan dystopia makes effective use of London’s own Barbican centre’s startling visual juxtaposition of vibrant greenery and brutalist, industrial architecture, which lays the foundation for their world’s playful, punky aesthetic and makes for a well-executed optical metaphor for the film’s thematic nucleus: the persistence of life, even in the midst of brutal, alienating inhumanity.

The Kitchen does ultimately struggle to wrangle its promising constituent parts into a whole with a cohesive momentum, leaving much of the film feeling somewhat pedestrian and clawing for rhythm. Nonetheless, it is imbued with a sincere, beating heart, which carries it over the line.

Matthew McMillan

The Kitchen is released in UK cinemas on 12^th January and on Netflix on 19^th January 2024.

Watch the trailer for The Kitchen here: