TH E KITC H EN 15

London falling…

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PAPER MOON 1973 Kaluuya cites Peter Bogdanovich’s pic as an inspo for The Kitchen’s father-child relationship.

BLADE RUNNER 2049 2017 Denis Villeneuve’s replicant sequel arguably boasts modern cinema’s most awesome dystopia.

IF THE STREETS WERE ON FIRE 2022 Some of The Kitchen’s daredevil bicyclists were previously seen in this vibrant documentary.

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★★★★★ OUT 19 JANUARY NETFLIX

Recent years have seen Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya voicing the Ghost of Christmas Past in a film of A Christmas Carol and playing Bill Sikes in an audiobook of Oliver Twist. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that there are aspects of both in the script he co-wrote (with Joe Murtagh) for The Kitchen, in which a Scrooge-like curmudgeon vies with a Fagin-esque gang leader for the allegiance of an orphan who’s fallen on, ahem, hard times.

But there the Dickens parallels end, replaced by shades of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley: writers whose dystopian depictions of futuristic societies get a vivid complement in the bleak vision of 2040 London that Kaluuya and co-helmer Kibwe Tavares have created for their directorial feature debut.

DIRECTORS Daniel Kaluuya, Kibwe Tavares STARRING Kane Robinson, Jedaiah Bannerman, Henry Lawfull SCREENPLAY Daniel Kaluuya, Joe Murtagh DISTRIBUTOR Warner Bros. RUNNING TIME 107 mins

In the metropolis to come, gleaming apartment blocks in the sky offer a life of antiseptic isolation to those who can afford it. Those who can’t have ‘The Kitchen’: a decaying commune of higgledy-piggledy social housing whose proud residents live in poverty under relentless government surveillance.

Having had enough of police raids and water shortages, Izi (Kane Robinson) has his eyes set on a onebed apartment in swanky Buena Vida. Just when he thinks he’s out, however, something pulls him back in: youthful Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman), an exgirlfriend’s kid who, having lost his mum, is in danger of being drawn into the violent insurgency that local Robin Hood Staples (Hope Ikpoku Jnr.) is waging against the authorities.

It’s a straightforward morality story at heart, reminiscent at times of

Stars Kane Robinson (Izi) and Jedaiah

Bannerman (Benji)

A Bronx Tale and with a sagacious neighbourhood DJ (Lord Kitchener, played, rather fabulously, by former footballer Ian Wright) cut from the same cloth as Samuel L. Jackson’s Mister Señor Love Daddy in Do the Right Thing. Yet it is such a stunningly and meticulously designed film that it continually captivates. Tavares draws on his background as an architect to show both the sterility of gentrification and the glorious dysfunction of that which it would eradicate.

One inspired flourish sees London’s brutalist Barbican Centre become a high-tech funeral home, while other scenes in The Kitchen find an ingenious new use for the shuttered HMP Holloway. In Robinson, meanwhile, we surely have tomorrow’s leading man, the Top Boy star exuding a potent charisma in a film that could potentially do to his career what Get Out did for

Kaluuya’s. NEIL SMITH

THE VERDICT A startling vision of the future that’s troublingly close to our present, with an affecting human story at its core. NETFLIX, WARNER BROS.