There are no aliens or intelligent killing machines threatening ordinary people in Netflix's new dystopian action drama. The kitchen by co-directors Daniel Kaluuya and Kibwe Tavares. But the film's fascinating story about the monsters of the future and how the most disadvantaged members of society have to face them feels all too real and like a reminder of the ways in which systemic poverty creates its own dystopia.
Set in an almost futuristic London, where fluorescent hologram advertisements dance across billboards and camera-embedded police drones hover silently high in the air. The kitchen It is a chronicle of what happens in its titular neighborhood. After years of private companies buying up public housing across the UK and transforming it into expensive luxury apartments for the rich, Kitchen – a towering, dilapidated apartment complex long scheduled for demolition – is the only place where London where people like Isaac (rapper Kane “Kano” Robinson) can really afford to live.
The Kitchen is beyond poor and its residents never know if the city will cut off their electricity and water. But it remains a bustling center of commerce where vendors sell food on streets packed with children playing and old people relaxing outside barbershops. There is always a tense atmosphere as Kitchener residents prepare for another of the city's violent police raids aimed at driving them from their homes.
But Kitchen's air is also constantly filled with the sound of music broadcast from Lord Kitchener's (Ian Wright) pirate radio station along with his calls for the neighborhood's predominantly black and brown community to hold on to the law. idea that they have a right to exist. in a place where their families have survived for decades.
As a Kitchener resident, Isaac, who works with his friend Jase (Demmy Ladipo) for a company that makes compost for the dead whose families cannot afford traditional funerals, knows that the neighborhood is much more than a block full of people occupying illegally condemned buildings. But after a lifetime of watching the Kitchen be razed and its residents brutalized by riot police, all Isaac wants is a chance to get out and move into the kind of skyscraper where he can isolate himself from the world and his feelings. .
The kitchen makes it easy to recognize the parallels between his vision of futuristic housing inequality and our current reality in which the tenants and Potential homebuyers around the world are increasingly priced out. of the limited and highly competitive real estate market. But the film's script written by Kaluuya and co-writers Rob Hayes and Joe Murtagh and its focus on young Londoners navigating the complexities of near-homelessness makes it The kitchen read as a scathing reflection of the devastating long-term impacts from United Kingdom Margaret Thatcher-era Right to Buy policies.
The kitchen presents its namesake as a cramped Kowloon-style patchwork of barely habitable spaces filled with outdated technology that contrasts starkly with the spacious neighborhoods nearby, where gleaming self-driving cars sit alongside luxury boutiques. At all times, Kitchen residents like Isaac and Staples (Hope Ikpoku Jr.), the leader of a motorcycle gang whose robberies provide Kitchen with its only source of food, are surrounded by reminders of the basic comforts they are denied.
But in many ways The kitchen illustrates how society systematically dehumanizes the poor, few are as profound as its description of Isaac going to work every day and convincing his neighbors to purchase a service that everyone understands is intended to erase them from the public consciousness. That erasure is part of what scares young orphan Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman) so much when he sees his mother's remains turned into tree fertilizer in Life After Life, where he meets Isaac for the first time. However, what really scares Isaac is his unshakeable sense that simply by being from the Kitchen, Benji's mother's fate was inevitable and a glimpse of what awaits Benji if he himself does not escape the Kitchen.
When Isaac and Benji enter each other's lives, The kitchen becomes a coming-of-age story of sorts, as well as a reflection on the power of community action and founded families. Isaac, a stoic character Robinson plays with a brilliant, emotionally congested quality, wants little to do with Benji when the pair first meet. There is no place for a child in Isaac's plan for the future or even in his current corner of the Kitchen, where he has to lock himself in every time the police show up ready to evict people by beating them to death.
But for all of Benji's ingenuity, he's just a guy who Isaac knows will end up working with Staples' team or killed because they live in a world full of systems designed to leave people like them with no other options. From somewhat different angles, the central concepts of The kitchen have been explored in films of other genres such as Attack the block and They cloned Tyronewhich both leaned much more towards their respective hard science fiction elements.
What are you doing? The kitchen What feels so different, however, is the way its subtle touches of speculative futurism work to highlight realities about how at-risk communities are policed and how riots end up becoming people's organic response to sponsored violence. For the state. Through Lord Kitchener's transmissions and Isaac's impending sense of dread, The kitchen He never lets us lose sight of the fact that the Kitcheners are fighting for their lives in a war they probably won't win.
But at the center of that struggle, there is an undeniable sense of hope and beauty in the lives of everyone at The Kitchen. The kitchenThe ability to showcase that beauty in intimate scenes between Isaac and Benji and in bigger moments like the film's stunning third act dance sequence, while also telling such a heartbreaking story, is a feat. And it's precisely what makes the film one of Netflix's most powerful new releases that you'll surely start hearing more about now that it's streaming.
