The Kitchen (2023) © Courtesy of Netflix
You could throw a dart at a map of London, and near its landing find an example of the city’s erosion of social housing that’s not too far flung from the premise of The Kitchen. The film feels steeped in London’s past of housing development and attempted social cleansing, centring around an occupied estate known as ‘The Kitchen’, where the previous homeowners refused to move out after it was bought from under their noses – its scenes of violent police retaliation recalling Southwark Council’s eviction of Aylesbury Estate residents in favour of a “regeneration” project.
The future on display in Daniel Kaluuya and Kibwe Tavares’s directorial debut is the endpoint of Thatcherite Right to Buy policies, a move which accelerated the demise of the city’s social housing which has since snowballed with encroaching gentrification and aggressive redevelopment – an invasion of luxury apartments, doomed to be left mostly unoccupied. That sociological attention to the connections between gentrification and styles of building design – the fading utopianism of concrete estates and the newer, glossy and soulless high-rises – may stem from Tavares’s own background in architecture, and that interest comes through keenly in The Kitchen’s presentation.
Through this thoughtful attention to civil infrastructure, The Kitchen’s worldbuilding becomes the film’s most interesting aspect (and not just because Ian Wright plays this film’s answer to Mr Señor Love Daddy from Do The Right Thing, 1989). At first glance, it mostly registers as your standard Black Mirror-core future, full of holographic signs and invasive advertisements, the reach of the larger scale shots perhaps exceeding the grasp of the film’s VFX. Some of the more tactile details – like robbers wearing masks out of discarded Nike Air Max heels – fare better. What stands out most is how Kaluuya and Tavares invest in the sociological relationship between people and architecture – the estate is full of communal solidarity rather than an affirmation of right-wing ideas about such places. The city outside The Kitchen is lifeless, quiet.
Inside, it’s full of life, a melting pot existing in antithesis to the soulless, glass-covered luxury developments that have been taking over London (Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers (2023) also paints a damning picture of such buildings).
The character work within this setting however feels less novel as the main character Izi (played by Top Boy’s Kane Robinson, aka Kano) looks for escape via new real estate, with a month to claim a shiny new flat. The trajectory of his relationship with the young boy he meets, Benji, is rather predictable and inoffensive as he weighs up his future against the boy’s. As a result the film feels unmoored, apart from brief moments where it ties communal pain to the threat of eviction and acts of revenge, and when it shows the courage to end on a rather bleak note. Unfortunately, The Kitchen’s ambient qualities — its implicit messaging about housing and its socio-political impact – are more interesting than its human components.
► The Kitchen is in UK cinemas now and arrives on Netflix UK 19 January.