If you like your sci-fi nightmares smart and socially aware, get into ‘The Kitchen’

The near future is bleak for the working class of London in “The Kitchen,” a well-executed film about a familiar kind of urban dystopian nightmare. It is, ironically, sunnier than the Los Angeles of “Blade Runner,” but the mood is as dire.

In this world, the have-nots are crammed together in hellish Brutalist high-rises, a slum-like development that its residents call the “Kitchen.” With frequent police raids and constant monitoring, there is the whiff of rebellion in the air. But at least for the purposes of this story, tensions have not yet boiled over into a proper revolution — the rage is manifested in smaller, petty crimes, such as a smash-and-grab jewelry raid.

Our protagonist Izi (rapper Kane Robinson) has a stable job, selling “eco” and “humane” burial plans to the desperate, grieving poor. Everything is whitewashed and slick and just a little sinister there — it’s called “life after life” after all. He and his colleagues wear clinical scrubs as they sell people on the idea of turning their deceased loved ones into plants.

He also has a plan: to get out. He’s saved enough money to escape the Kitchen and has finally broken through the logjam of a waitinglist to get into one of the luxury apartment buildings in town. A single occupancy for a single guy. Naturally the film won’t let him go that easily, but the complication isn’t just financial: A kid enters the picture.

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One day at work he notices that a woman he once dated is being given a funeral on the premises. Inside, he discovers her son Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman), a teen who doesn’t know who his father is. The two dance around the obvious question and Benji ends up on Izi’s doorstep in need of something — help, lodging, care — but again, these things go largely unspoken. Benji is at a sliding-doors kind of moment in which the fast cash from dangerous crimes seems almost worth the risk. What does he have to lose anyway?

“The Kitchen” was directed by “Get Out’s” Daniel Kaluuya and Kibwe Tavares, who has turned his gaze before on the intersection of architecture, race and class in the short film “Robots of Brixton.” Kaluuya co-wrote the “Kitchen” script with Joe Murtagh, inspired by a story he heard about “kids doing million-dollar heists in a minute for £200.” “The Kitchen” may lag at times, but it’s an astonishing and fully realized feat for two first-time feature directors, with beautifully raw sequences of both emotion and action.

It is quite a pleasure to watch Izi and Benji navigate their awkward relationship, both wondering how much they should trust each other. But in this world of urban isolation it’s clear, at least to us, that they need each other — no matter how much you’re rooting for Izi to make it out. There are also moments of humor in this rather serious affair, including Izi’s frustrating conversation with an AI customer service representative.

Like so many futuristic dystopias, “The Kitchen” is really about the present: about class divides and wealth gaps and unaffordable housing and the ways in which it’s all getting worse so quickly. This is one of those films that would have been fun on the big screen with its urgent action sequences and propulsive nightclub scenes, but it’s a perfect small-screen watch too. And, hopefully, the beginning of a big co-directing career for Kaluuya and Tavares, who have proved that they have something worthwhile to say and the vision to make it entertaining as well.