Netflix’s The Kitchen is a nightmarish glimpse of Britain’s future

If there’s a fight I’m fighting this week it’s that The Kitchen definitely beats the “no plotline” allegations. Daniel Kaluuya’s slow-burning directorial debut dropped on Netflix this week and has steadily held the number one position, however audiences have been divided in their response. Some have called it “confusing” (noted here by the bastion of culture, LadBible) and boring, others have seen it as masterful social commentary. While there are valid criticisms over the pacing of the film, it’s a snapshot of Britain’s poverty and a look into the future we could be headed towards. 

The film features Kano – and his doe eyes framed by the most incredible eyelashes – as the sad boy protagonist, Izi. It is essentially a touching tale of a man coming to terms with his responsibilities, not only to himself but to his community and to the next generation (especially when they’re Benji, who is definitely his son from a failed past relationship). This universal story of men growing up and showing up is set against the backdrop of another familiar story: Britain’s housing crisis.

The block Izi lives in – the eponymous Kitchen – has great community spirit, but is being smothered by authoritarian forces who want them to leave by making life in The Kitchen unbearable. While the camaraderie among residents leads them to resist – some by any means – to stay in their homes, near their friends and the culture that they’ve built despite adversity, Izi cannot be bothered to struggle against the state and wants to live in a nice privately rented minimalist flat. Every day he wakes up to sell low-cost funeral packages to people who can’t afford to die in style and upsells them a package where they can be turned into a tree that can be planted which gives him more commission so that he can turn his back on the struggle and live in peace.

The story has precedent. After World War Two, Britain became hyper-focused on slums. The councils and town planners said something had to be done about the old-fashioned and poor-quality housing. The homes of working-class residents in Bethnal Green, for example, were declared slums and bulldozed. A tight-knit community, their activism against poverty, and their distinct culture dissipated as the council threw them on top of each other in high-rise blocks, streets that stretched into the sky. We know now that this era of the state encircling a community, moving in to tear it down and rebuild it with a short-sighted vision has done very little for working-class communities and that the availability of council housing is worse now than it ever has been. Now, councils want to tear them down too.

Decades later, in the spring of 2022, a stone’s throw from both housing estates and artisan cafes, I turned from the shape-shifting main road in Bethnal Green away from the bleating traffic and entered The Kitchen. Well, I entered the set that Kaluuya described to me from his director’s chair as “a boroughless blend of north, south with an east feel” to watch the film come to life from behind the scenes. And it all felt eerily familiar.

I’d kept a close eye on the New Era Estate case in Hoxton in the neighbouring borough of Hackney. It had resisted the rising gentrification in the area with 93 households paying £150 a week for rent, until it was bought by American-based private equity firm Westbrook who declared they were hiking the rent up 10 per cent. Vacant flats were advertised through word of mouth so the estate was essentially a collection of several generations of low-income families who had grown up or grown old on the estate. Children would come of age and move out into other flats on the same site as their parents. With an unaffordable hike in rent, these families would be pushed not just out of the building but out of the borough which was quickly becoming gentrified. They enlisted the help of then-local (then-culturally acceptable) Russell Brand who picketed with them, fought with journalists on the news and pinned eviction notices to the home of the multi-millionaire property developer. All of this caused a media storm that meant the tenants won their fight.

But social cleansing in the capital has been happening aggressively for decades. Council housing stock has plummeted by three million post-Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ scheme, which is why you see ex-council flats being flogged on Modern House for half a mill. 

Housing estates are being demolished in favour of new blocks where developers pay local councils to waive their responsibility of making a significant percentage of the building affordable. When they do fulfil their obligation to create affordable housing, in order to receive planning permission, the tenants that may have already faced the stress of rising rents, intimidation or eviction who have landed in these new blocks are humiliated through other means, like “poor doors”, a separate entrance that keeps them segregated from the rest of the building, or by being kept away from standout facilities. Who could forget the Nine Elms sky pool that affordable housing residents are banned from using? Soulless and isolating like Izi’s privately rented flat. 

Exactly a year after I visited The Kitchen set, I met a 65-year-old woman who opened her home up on the Aylesbury estate in Peckham to present an exhibition that compiled her fight against Southwark council for the last 20 years. The estate was quiet and felt abandoned. A poster on her front door read: “If the media have made the Aylesbury famous by calling it a ‘sink estate’ the campaigners have brought it to prominence as a site of ongoing resistance against the violent racist and classist logic of gentrification and social cleansing.” After squatters occupied the block to prevent its demolition, riot police gutted the community, and this was her last form of rebellion. She no longer lives there.

The disturbing violence might feel like dystopian when you watch it, but it has a lot of parallels. Even today there are new figures around police harassment of Black communities with Black children making up for 20 per cent of stop and searches despite being six per cent of the population. Over three-quarters of these stops result in no further action, which essentially means many Black children are being demeaned and humiliated for no reason. These searches mostly take place in the poorest neighbourhoods. To many young Black and criminalised boys, the feeling of being under siege is not too far away from their current reality. Pair this with the limits on food and water and you see how basic health is denied to oppressed people to exacerbate their situation. Take Dorchester Court in Herne Hill which is owned by a multi-millionaire landlord but has allowed such a decline in quality of housing that residents found three times the legal limit of lead in their tap water. It also has parallels between the dynamic of residents in densely populated occupied territories like Gaza, showing the horrific progression of unchallenged state violence. 

Some of the critiques of The Kitchen concern its pacing, which is an artistic choice I back. There are large sections of the film where you’re initiated into the humdrum of the block. There’s the hustle and bustle of the market, the electricity of the roller rink but many moments are languid, just living and waiting. But such is life and many indie movies are hyperfocused on diving into the minutiae of a few characters’ existence. And as shots in cinema get shorter and shorter, and TikTok fries our little minds, there’s something to be said for slow cinema. Lingering on a point, making a viewer absorb each detail and sit with this reality. How slow do you think the past 20 years felt for Aysen Dennis? Or for all the tenants in the city sifting through legal jargon, banding together to resist through collective action or drawn-out court cases to keep their homes? 

Another is that the resistance looks grotesque and intimidating to comfortable families living in luxury elsewhere. An argument which is largely reminiscent of all disruptive forms of resistance from Mandela’s anti-apartheid tactics in South Africa that led to him being on a terrorist watch list until 2008 to Just Stop Oil right now. We don’t get a big heroic scene where Izi changes his mind and beats the claustrophobic oppression of the state standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his community. He just goes back to make sure his kid is alright. But if anything, this is realistic. Many of us are manifesting our minimalistic flat in the hopes we might be able to create a little haven for ourselves and our future partner or children, rather than chaining ourselves to our shared houses or flats and refusing to be moved by the malevolent will of the market hiking rents and taking the heart out of working-class, young, and artistic communities around the city.

If you didn’t get what The Kitchen was trying to say, look around you. It’s where we could be headed if we don’t engage in the collective struggle between the haves and the have-nots.