There’s a rich mix of ingredients in this heartfelt and likably acted film from co-directors Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya, set in a chaotic, favela-type London housing estate of the near future, nicknamed “the Kitchen”. It takes something from the French banlieue movies of Mathieu Kassovitz and Ladj Ly, while running a seedier and more downbeat version of the postmodern alienation of Total Recall or Blade Runner. But it is also a slightly sentimental-realist family drama, and I felt that for all its high-energy pyrotechnics, in its final moments The Kitchen paints itself into a bit of a narrative corner.
The Kitchen setting itself is tremendously fabricated on screen, with top-notch special effects work; it is a spectacularly rundown housing block surrounded on all sides by glitzy new apartment buildings for the heartless better off. The city authorities have in fact decided on the Kitchen’s demolition and high-handedly ordered residents to leave, but the people are refusing on the grounds that this is where they have built their community and homes – for all its poverty, there is a bustling, vivid atmosphere.
