Netflix has a habit of acquiring promising titles only to throw them into its catalog without even a touch of promotion. This is becoming an even bigger problem as the streamer gets larger, but of all of Netflix’s recent acquisitions, few are more deserving of the platform than the dystopian thriller titled Kitchen.
Despite its unannounced premiere on Netflix, the film makes an enormous impression. Kitchen highlights Daniel Kaluuya (NO, Judas and the Black Messiah) directorial debut alongside short film director Kibwe Tavares. Kaluuya also co-wrote the film’s script “Gangs of London”Joe Murtagh, cementing the vision of a dystopian London in the near future with an unconventional story about finding family. It is designed in the style of Blokamp, but focuses on the British black diaspora. It’s a shame that such a singular film cannot be seen on the biggest screen, but at the least it deserves to be seen by as many eyes as possible.
The kitchen is a powder keg able to explode. This housing development on London’s South Bank is one of the last bastions of resistance to the gentrification that has chewed up the city from the inside and spewed out an unlimited, cubist monstrosity. It is unclear where one constructing ends and the other begins. But areas of authentic culture, e.g lifepersist – and the reluctant hero Izi (The best boyKane Robinson, also often called rapper Kano) is at the center of all of it.
Izi was born in the Kitchen, but he’ll be damned if he spends one other day in the projects. Through a gig at an environmentally conscious funeral home, he saved enough to purchase an apartment in a nicer part of town. He has 21 days to secure the rest of his funds and escape, but things get complicated when he meets newly orphaned Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman).
Izi knew Benji’s deceased mother, one of the few Kitchen natives who secured higher housing elsewhere, and Benji insists that his dim-witted dad remains to be hanging around the housing complex. Could this be Izi? Benji actually thinks so, and that hope sparks an unlikely bond in the crumbling fortress.
As Benji adjusts to life in the Kitchen, underground dance halls and pirate radio sessions turn out to be part of a promising recent life. The kitchen is not exactly paradise – it has its own criminal empire and is vulnerable to unpredictable power outages and police raids. But it is also the only community Benji has ever known. The lure of neon is seductive and feels right at home amongst a close-knit group of lost boys.
Izi does what she will to guard her recent protégé from the dark side of the Kitchen, all while keeping Benji at bay. But the lone wolf and cub will inevitably unite against the forces that need to tear the Kitchen apart.
Kaluuya and Tavares’ directorial debut is light motion and thrilling. Kitchen’The tech-y dystopia is shot with a discreet eye, focusing less on artificial intelligence and more on housing inequality and growing state surveillance. Systemic injustice is barely reinforced by advances in technology and oppressive infrastructure. This is not a future of laser swords or skateboards, and the marginalized do not have the tools to fight existing technology. As the state withholds resources and attacks the defenseless, the residents of the Kitchen are forced to depend on one another, even in the face of destruction.
In some parts of the world that is already a reality. “Every city has its own cuisine” – the film’s marketing reminds us, and Kaluuya and Tavares don’t allow us to ignore it for a moment. Police raids are organized with grim, businesslike brutality; Izi’s encounters with a sympathetic AI are fraught with familiar microaggressions. This makes the intimate moments between Izi and Benji much more significant and their shared resilience much more impressive.
Kitchen is a subtle, speculative exercise and is a fitting complement to recent stories of Black-led futurists akin to They cloned Tyrone. The biggest query for Kaluuya, Tavares and Murtagh is whether or not Izi and Benji will give you the option to flee the cycle of bloodshed. While they use a futuristic premise to inform this slow-burn story, it never gets in the way of the heartwarming dynamics at its core.
Kitchen keeps transmitting Netflix.
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Credit : www.inverse.com
