There are no aliens or sentient killing machines threatening ordinary people going about their lives in Netflix’s new dystopian action drama. the kitchen Co-directors include Daniel Kaluuya and Kiboy Tavares. But the film’s compelling story about the monsters of the future and how the most disadvantaged members of society must stand up to them rings very real and feels like a reminder of the ways in which systemic poverty creates its own dystopia.
The film is set in a semi-futuristic London where fluorescent hologram advertisements dance across signs and camera-covered police drones loom silently in the air. the kitchen It is an account of the events that take place in the titular neighborhood. After years of public housing across the UK being bought up by private companies and turned into expensive luxury apartments for the wealthy, The Kitchen – a dilapidated high-rise apartment complex that had long been slated for demolition – is the only place in London where people like… Isaac. (Rapper Ken “Kano” Robinson) can really make a living.
The kitchen is so poor, its residents never know if the city will cut off their electricity and water. But it’s still a bustling mall with vendors selling food on streets crowded with children playing, and old men relaxing on the doorstep of barber shops. There’s always an air of tension as the residents of Ketchers prepare for another one of the city’s violent police raids aimed at evicting them from their homes.
But the kitchen air is also constantly filled with the sound of music broadcasting from Lord Kitchener’s (Ian Wright) pirate radio station along with his calls for the neighborhood’s predominantly black and colored community to uphold the idea that they have a right to exist in a place where their families have survived for decades.
As a Kitchener himself, Isaac — who works with his friend Jesse (Demi Ladipo) at a company that converts dead people whose families can’t afford traditional funerals — knows that the neighborhood is much more than just a building full of people sitting illegally in the neighborhood. Condemned buildings. But after spending his life watching the kitchen be destroyed and its residents brutalized by police in riot gear, all Isaac wants is a chance to get out and move into some kind of high-rise where he can isolate himself from the world and his feelings. .
the kitchen It makes it easy to see the parallels between her vision of future housing inequality and our current reality where potential renters and homebuyers around the world are increasingly priced out of a limited, highly competitive real estate market. But the film’s screenplay by Kaluuya and co-writers Rob Hayes and Joe Murtagh and its focus on young Londoners navigating the complexities of near-homelessness make the kitchen This book can be read as a poignant reflection on the long-term devastating effects of Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy policies in the United Kingdom.
the kitchen Its namesake is a tight, Kowloon-like mosaic of barely livable spaces filled with outdated technology that contrasts sharply with the spacious neighborhoods nearby, where shiny, driverless cars park in luxury boutiques. At all times, kitchen residents like Isaac and Staples (Hope Ikpoko Jr.) — the leader of a biker gang whose thefts provide the kitchen with its only source of food — are surrounded by reminders of the basic comforts they’ve been denied.
But among many ways the kitchen It shows how society systematically dehumanizes the poor, and few are as profound as the depiction of Isaac going to work every day and convincing his neighbors to buy a service that they all understand to be aimed at erasing them from the public consciousness. This erasure is part of what frightens young orphan Benjy (Jediah Bannerman) so much about seeing his mother’s remains turned into tree fertilizer in the afterlife, which is where he first meets Isaac. But what really terrifies Isaac is his unshakable sense that just by being in the kitchen, Benjy’s mother’s fate was inevitable and a glimpse of what’s in store for Benjy if he doesn’t escape the kitchen himself.
When Isaac and Benjy enter each other’s lives, the kitchen It becomes a kind of coming-of-age story as well as a rumination on the power of community work and the families that are established. Isaac – a stoic character whom Robinson portrays with a wonderful, emotionally fraught quality – wants little to do with Benjy when the pair first meet. There is no room 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 when the police show up ready to evict people by beating them to death.
But despite Benjy’s resourcefulness, he’s just a boy who Isaac knows will end up running away with the Staples crew or getting 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 It has been explored in other genre films such as Attack the forbidden And They cloned Tyroneboth of which leaned more heavily into their hard science fiction elements.
What makes the kitchen However, what seems so distinctive is the way in which the subtle touches of speculative futurism serve to highlight the realities of how vulnerable communities are policed and how riots end up becoming people’s organic response to state-sponsored violence. Through both Lord Kitchener’s programs and Isaac’s sense of fear, the kitchen Never lose sight of the fact that the inhabitants of the kitchen are fighting for their lives in a war they are unlikely to win.
But at the heart of that battle, there is an undeniable sense of hope and beauty in the lives of everyone in the kitchen. the kitchen‘s ability to display such beauty in intimate scenes between Isaac and Benji and in larger moments like the surprise dance scene in the film’s third act, all while telling a story so heartbreaking, is a great accomplishment. And that’s exactly what makes the film one of Netflix’s strongest new releases and one that you’re sure to start hearing more about now that it’s streaming.