There’s a rich mix of ingredients in this heartfelt and likably acted film from co-directors Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya, set in a chaotic, favela-type London housing estate of the near future, nicknamed “the Kitchen”. It takes something from the French banlieue movies of Mathieu Kassovitz and Ladj Ly, while running a seedier and more downbeat version of the postmodern alienation of Total Recall or Blade Runner. But it is also a slightly sentimental-realist family drama, and I felt that for all its high-energy pyrotechnics, in its final moments The Kitchen paints itself into a bit of a narrative corner.
The Kitchen setting itself is tremendously fabricated on screen, with top-notch special effects work; it is a spectacularly rundown housing block surrounded on all sides by glitzy new apartment buildings for the heartless better off. The city authorities have in fact decided on the Kitchen’s demolition and high-handedly ordered residents to leave, but the people are refusing on the grounds that this is where they have built their community and homes – for all its poverty, there is a bustling, vivid atmosphere.
Izi (played by actor and musician Kane Robinson) is a hardworking guy, employed by a rather creepy eco-funeral business called Life After Life; it offers to mix post-cremation remains with seedlings and create a memorial plant. Izi is under no illusions as to what it’s actually like living in the Kitchen, and he is saving up for a brand-new modern flat, part of precisely that sprawling property development which is putting pressure on the Kitchen. And here the film cleverly allows you to notice the living-death quality in both these apartments and the funeral plant gardens.
At work one day, Izi notices that one of the soulless services routinely taking place in the facility’s antiseptic chapel-style memorial zones is for a woman that he used to date. This woman’s troubled teen son Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman) is there too, the only mourner, and a fellow Kitchen resident. Izi and Benji strike up an uneasy cross-generational friendship, each aware of a certain possibility that can hardly be said out loud. And back in the Kitchen itself, where armed police are getting ready to move in with tyrannical force, Benji has to decide if he wants to hang out with radical hoodlums or with caring, flawed Izi. But then Izi, too, must decide if he can imagine a future with Benji.
There are some big-ticket action sequences: the robbing of an online food delivery van and a smash-and-grab raid on a jeweller in a posh part of town. They are impressive setpieces, not precisely exciting in the way they would be in a more generic thriller, but fiercely presented as symptoms of inequality. It is with the actual relationship between Izi and Benji that I felt that the movie moved with a heavier tread, though there are also some sharp notes of humour – the film providing a big laugh when Izi has to answer the flat-rental company’s infuriatingly bland auto-generated voice prompts when he arrives to pay his deposit. A worthwhile, engaged film.
• The Kitchen screened at the London film festival, and is released on 12 January in UK cinemas and on 19 January on Netflix.
