Becoming The Muse

The Kitchen Movie Review

The Kitchen is a 2024 British dystopian drama movie directed by  Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya. It was released in select cinemas in the United Kingdom on 12 January 2024 before its streaming debut by Netflix on 19 January 2024.

Set in a futuristic London where social housing has been eliminated, a community that resides in a derelict apartment block known as The Kitchen refuses to abandon the place they have called home….

The Good

The Kitchen has a vivid visual aesthetic that combines futuristic and realistic elements to bring about a believable colour palette which makes the movie though set in a future that feels a few statutory instruments away from reality than an abstract dystopian future…

Kane Robinson as Izi delivers a powerful and emotive performance as a man torn between looking out for himself, that desire for a better life and his ties to The Kitchen and its community and a child he has taken under his wing…

The movie introduces Jedaiah Bannerman as Benji a young and impressionable teen who has just lost his mother and trying to find his place in a world where each one looks out for number and a gang the only place an orphan can find acceptance however fleeting…

The heart of The Kitchen is a father and son coming of age story, where a man used to fending for himself, with no real attachments, only acquaintances becomes a pseudo parent to the son of an old ex and by extension reconnect with a community he had lost connection with.

The movie is socio-political commentary on classism, gentrification and what happens when you eliminate affordable housing for low income earners. The Kitchen’s days are numbered and is subjected to frequent and violent raids by police encouraging them to evacuate from the premises they are now illegally occupying..

The Kitchen handles poverty with a subtlety that doesn’t turn the storyline into poverty porn or romanticising the people struggle but simply highlights the challenges they face as well as the beating heartbeat of the community.

The Bad

It has a couple of intense action packed moments but make no mistake The Kitchen is a slow burn emotive drama film about family, community and inequality.

The film has a lot going on from the world building to characters and a broad range of themes that it comes across as lacking focus and coherence… for example Kane Robinson’s character Izi seems to have a back story that’s never explored and that makes it hard to fully understand his character nor empathise with it..

Benji is a pivotal character who is supposed to hold the plot together but feels as if the character is never fully developed and we never experience what should be a strong conflict between his gang ties and pseudo family with Izi.

Then there is The Kitchen‘s Lord Kitchener the resident DJ / podcast host and the de facto leader and voice of the community.. whose character and role feels downplayed from what it really should be.

The Ugly

While I am not familiar with concept of social housing which the movie seems to be advocating against its ending… I have however lived through an era where our government demolished housing structures that were deemed illegal either in undesignated areas or not conforming to housing by-law standards… dubbed as Operation Murambatsvina…

This operation left people stranded and homeless without offering any form of aid or recompense.. From that experience, the premise of the movie isn’t some distant dystopian story, but something that has happened, can happen and will happen when you build in community co-operative projects and along comes someone with deep pockets who buys the land and consequently your homes from beneath your feet….

There’s also something about people no longer affording grave space and instead the cheap alternative is to have the remains of your loved ones cremated and made into bio friendly seedlings that are later planted at undisclosed locations….

Final Thoughts

If you are not expecting a fast paced action packed thriller… The Kitchen might surprise you with its emotive and thought provoking dystopian storyline…. I stumbled into the mobie quite by accident and rather surprised that it was released without much in the way of marketing and promo such as Lift yet its easily the most thought provoking movie of 2024 so far.

Have you watched it? Thoughts?