A Netflix movie about class and social order.
Not to be confused with the Melissa McCarthy crime film “The Kitchen,” which I didn’t review. But rather the new made-for-Netflix Sci-Fi drama “The Kitchen,” which is the directorial debut for “Get Out” survivor Daniel Kaluuya and short subject filmmaker Kibwe Tavares.
Subtract the spaceships and Harrison Ford, and you have yourself a low-budgeted British “Blade Runner” type movie like “The Kitchen.” It takes place in a dystopian London where social housing has been eliminated, where the rich and the poor have divided themselves, and where characters are tested by the laws of their reality. The story is too uneven to be original, but there’s a complexity within this reality and its citizens that really draws us in.
There are some fun activities like shooting down drones with giant sling shots, bikers popping wheelies, listening to the DJ Lord Kitchener (Ian Wright)-who seems to be borrowed from Walter Hill’s “The Warriors”- and even bazaars and night clubs know how to be elaborate.
But there are also difficulties like how law enforcement has cracked down hard. And I mean really cracked down hard. They would even have SWAT teams raiding your homes to spread fear in the community. That is if we can call it a community. Police brutality, one might say.
How could live in these harsh times?
As the story begins, we meet Izi (British rapper Kane Robinson A.K.A. Kano), who lives in the Kitchen, and hates his job at the Life After Life funeral home where the dearly departed who can’t afford funerals would be cremated and turned into soil to help plant trees.
We also meet Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman), whose mother just passed away and is planted at Life After Life, and meets Izi, who knew his mother way back. The boy has heard things about the Kitchen, especially since his deadbeat dad whom he never met lives there, and so Izi ends up becoming his new guardian.
If this guy knew his mom in their past, and the boy never met his father, then could Izi be Benji’s biological father? I don’t think it really matters. What matters is their connection and how each of them thrives on it and learns from it. Robinson and Bannerman both deliver good performances in this very notion, and their characters are people you can sympathize with.
The story doesn’t justify itself from the real world (that is if we can call it the real world), but “The Kitchen” does wish to show us poor people struggling to survive in a cruel environment. Probably crueler than the one we already live in, which we why we would eventually have them attacking the rich people with a “New Order” sense.
When it comes to social orders, there is a distinction between rich and poor, strong and weak, and greed and generosity. It’s always in the near future, when this subject matter gets quite damaging. The kind that really destroys society. “The Kitchen” pulsates in that notion, especially when we get shots of the police attacking people, and then fighting back. In both our world and their world, there is such thing as police brutality, and it’s sad.
It’s a bleak, but consistent directorial debut for Kaluuya and Tavares.
Streaming on Netflix