Bored, underprivileged youths stage a daring motorbike raid on uptown jewellers; local DJ Lord Kitchener (voiced by Ian Wright) calls for social cohesion against an oppressive backdrop of police beatings and forced evictions.
Welcome to the Kitchen, a terrifying vision of neoliberal blighted London in the 2040s, where futuristic tech and mushrooming skyscrapers can’t mask grinding poverty. The illegal residents of the lively high-rise estate of the title sell from stalls and bustle around labyrinthine pathways, only to beat a hasty retreat behind armoured doors whenever a cacophony of banging pots signals an incoming police raid.
Izi (played by the musician and Top Boy actor Kane Robinson), one of the locals, works at an ecofuneral business called Life After Life, which promises to grow plants from postcremation remains. He’s counting the days until he can pay for new digs in Buena Vida, a luxury apartment complex. His exit from the Kitchen becomes complicated when he notices Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman), the sole mourner at the funeral of Izi’s former girlfriend. Benji is immediately taken with the man who could be his father. Unhappily, Izi’s burgeoning sense of parental concern coincides with escalating government-sponsored brutality against the Kitchen’s residents.
There are welcome shades of La Haine and Do the Right Thing in Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya’s directorial debut, cohelmed by the architect turned film-maker Kibwe Tavares. The urban grit is offset by spectacular sci-fi trimmings, including billboards that would look at home in Blade Runner or Total Recall and a suitably dystopian score by the Hackney-born rapper and composer Labrinth and Alex Baranowski.
The scale is somewhat disjointed. The central father-son plotline feels a little too modest to accommodate Wyatt Garfield’s impressively shot action set pieces, Nathan Parker’s ambitious production design and scathing social commentary, but this remains an impressive and visually innovative directorial debut for the film-makers.
The Kitchen is in selected cinemas and on Netflix from Friday, January 19th
