It is brilliant and right that the London Film Festival’s closing gala is the world premiere of a film set in London. A film that is the directorial debut of London’s current best actor, Daniel Kaluuya, already of course an Oscar winner (co-directing with another London-born filmmaker Kibwe Tavares). And a film that puts one of London’s most exciting TV stars – Kane ‘Kano’ Robinson – front and centre. There is even a small role for a bona fide London institution, with Ian Wright popping up as a sort of town crier-slash-DJ. Pretty much everyone involved in this film likely grew up within a couple of tube stops of the set, which you don’t get in Cannes or Venice or even Toronto.
So it would be wonderful to report that The Kitchen is a masterpiece. But that would not be true.
It does at least look fabulous: one of those dystopias that doesn’t have everyone zipping around on hoverboards and speaking into transparent phones, instead offering up a near, near future in which the tech advancements are more subtle. The housing estate which gives the film its name is dirty and Trellick-left-to-rot brutalist, with the only hints that we are in the future being the odd crypto market stall or the police drones hovering overhead.
There is, too, a brilliant, striking design choice in the London skyline that the characters gaze at, with a gigantic, loop-shaped skyscraper that towers over the Shard. The contrast between its hyper-modernity and the fact that The Kitchen’s residents bang rusty old pots and pans out of the windows in unison when the police turn up to evict them – in this future all social housing has been eradicated – is smart.
The problem is that none of the dystopian elements feed into the plot at all – it could easily be set in the present, or the past, or whenever – and that the story being told (the script is co-written by Kaluuya and Joe Murtagh, who just did the BBC’s Woman In The Wall) is slight to say the least.
We meet Kano’s Issac – or Izi as everyone calls him – who lives in a tiny, cramped apartment in The Kitchen and works at a future funeral home called Life After Life that plants trees in the deceased’s honour. Izi sidles into the back row of one particular wake in honour of a woman, the mother of 12-year-old Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman, making his debut). They strike up conversation. From the outset it is heavily implied that Izi is Benji’s father: suggested by the fact that every time Benji asks him for something Izi tells him to go away, then relents. Soon the pair are sharing Izi’s cramped apartment.
And that pretty much is… that. Benji falls in for a bit with the wrong crowd, there are riots on the estate, but essentially this is a story about a kid slowly not-really-bonding with a man who may or may not be his father. Neither Benji nor Izi say a great deal to each other, rarely raising their voices or doing much of anything. So The Kitchen is a mood piece, really: it’s just that the mood is unfortunately not very interesting at all.
The Kitchen is at the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday October 15; bfi.org.uk/lff
98 mins, cert TBC
