Co-helmed by Kibwe Tavares, the closing night gala selection for the BFI London Film Festival is an absorbing study of survival.

The Kitchen imagines a near-future London where gentrification isn’t achieved just by subtle shifts in planning policy and infrastructure adjustments, but by outright violence from the police. Wait … isn’t that happening already? Perhaps, but right now not with the same brazen brutality in Britain’s capital as is seen in this striking directorial debut for short filmmaker Kibwe Tavares (Jonah) and actor Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out, Black Panther).

When The Kitchen takes place is never specified. Still, judging by the blend of real locations (specifically housing estates in London and Paris) and visual effects (some structures were based on slums in Venezuela), and the fact that people are still driving petrochemical vehicles, it would seem this is maybe a not-far-off 2025, when the U.K. government plans to ban the sale of gas-powered cars. That, or the powers that be failed to honor their own pledges, which, judging by the form of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s current waffling on the date, is quite likely, too. Either way, it’s notable that climate catastrophe is not the problem here, which makes a change from most dystopian fiction these days. Instead, the engine of conflict is the scarcity of affordable housing, certainly a problem many Londoners and other city dwellers today will recognize.

Judging by the way he keeps hitting “pay later” when asked by the AI computer interface, Izi is clearly not earning a lot of bank at his job at high-tech funeral home Life After Life, where he tries to upsell services to the bereaved as much as possible. The basic budget package at least turns the recently deceased into soil for little trees that are kept on display in Life After Life’s nursery for a limited period, allowing the bereaved to visit until the trees are taken away to unspecified locations. (It’s implied that the company just throws them away.)

One day at work, Izi notices a funeral taking placed for a woman he used to know back in the day. There are hardly any mourners there apart from the woman’s 13- or 14-year-old son, Benji (Bannerman, beautifully directed to maximize his potent screen presence). Now orphaned and abandoned in a Buena Vida flat with only the bicycle birthday present his mum left for him, Benji comes back a day later to talk to the plant that she’s growing into, and Izi and he get chatting. It becomes clear that Izi might be the man who fathered Benji, a possibility that sits silently unspoken between them, the paternity elephant in the room. Demonstrating that he’s not entirely callous, Izi takes Benji in when the latter shows up at the Kitchen looking for him.

However, another potential father figure emerges in the shape of Staples (Hope Ikpoku Jr.), a Robin Hood-type figure who leads his band of merry men and women in raids to steal food for distribution among the Kitchen’s poor and hungry. Some of that gets cooked up in the ramshackle maze of street stalls that looks a lot like Brixton’s market but sprinkled with Blade Runner-style neon and holograms. The Kitchen also has, deep in the basement of one building, its own roller disco. That’s where Izi, Benji and seemingly everyone who’s still ambulatory goes on a weekend night to bop to a delicious mix of hip-hop, grime, classic R&B, Afrobeats and, at one glorious point, Cameo’s floor-filling 1986 hit “Candy” that prompts a synchronized collective performance, like the Slide or the Hustle.

That guidance is needed, given that the community often must recover from the repeated violent raids by the police, incursions heralded by residents banging pots and pans out their windows, an angry inversion of a custom that developed during COVID-19 lockdowns as a tribute to national health service workers. But even though it’s meant to signal a warning here, it still works as a symbol of a community coming together despite atomization imposed by the state. Elsewhere, scenes in which Staples and his crew ride around on bikes and motorcycles, popping wheelies and having fun, are similarly strong.

Those kind of thoughtful, resonant small details add potency, though some viewers may be more moved than I was by the rocky evolution of Izi and Benji’s relationship. Their interactions have genuine warmth, especially in scenes that allow Bannerman to show off a dry comic timing. But the constant hither and yon of Izi abandoning Benji and then coming back gets a little tired over the long haul and feels jerry-rigged to add conflict. Still, they are interesting enough together to make a sequel, possibility hinted at in the last minutes, feel like a welcome next step.