Review of The Kitchen (2019) by Jazgalaxy — 13 Aug 2019

The Kitchen is a mess. A mess, in cooking, could be defined as perfectly good ingredients combined so artlessly and unskillfully, without any plan or care, that the end result has no discernible flavor and betrays the integrity of its components. The kitchen is mostly well acted, well intentioned and well shot. But it’s direction and editing is SO unskilled that it’s hard to understand what the film is even ABOUT. It’s structure is so sloppy that at times I found myself feeling as though I was watching a foreign film from some country I’d never heard of. At several points in the film, characters just... walk away in the middle of a scene. It’s plays out like a socially awkward friend who doesn’t know to excuse themselves when they choose to go elsewhere. In one scene even the other characters are like, “what? Did she just leave?!” The film is FULL of such bizarre content. A few vignette scenes interspliced between sequences are SO bizarre that I STILL don’t understand them, like a random scene where one character secretly watches two other characters have sex. It’s not explained one iota in the film and actually sent me to the Graphic Novel source material to try to sort it out.

The film also cannot decide if it wants to be funny. Some dark comedies will juxtapose humor with graphic violence and deep emotion. The Kitchen tries to do all of these things in the same SCENE. In the end, the kitchen is a nihilistic power fantasy for feminists who don’t realize that this film would have been far more feminist, and a better work of art, if it had dropped the childish feminist charicatures and plot contrivances.

It’s also with noting that a big problem of the graphic novel and the movie both is that the collective writers don’t seem to know a whole lot about how organized crime actually runs.