Boiling Point (dir. Philip Barantini, 2021) — Review

Few can match the British aptitude for cinematic rubbernecking. In Boiling Point- a 90-minute, one-shot rampage through a crowded restaurant, in which the camera acts as an invisible, voyeuristic Karen- this tendency to nosiness, and the nation’s edgy, regional acting talent, are stretched to their limits. Starring Stephen Graham as put-upon chef Andy Jones, the film chronicles one disastrous night in a trendy East London restaurant. The Christmas tree looms ominously by the door as only the first in a slew of glaring harbingers of doom for Jones and his customers, which nonetheless unwind with the grim, riveting certainty of a slow-motion car crash.

We first meet a belated Jones pre-service, heading into the restaurant and apologizing to his ex-wife for missing his son’s swimming competition, only to be met with a trilbied, pedantic health inspector (Thomas Coombes). Thomas Coombes’s trilbied stickler, steals the first scene- dismayed by the oysters, tutting at the record-keeping. That the paperwork would be a mess makes sense when we meet head chef and owner Andy Jones (a bristling Stephen Graham), dogged by crisis even before the row over the turbot. The script drip-drips the details: marriage problems, money problems. (How the place might have done during Covid casts a gloomy thought too far.) Yet it all fades into the background as the temperature rises, pressure mounts and the bookings file in and the cooks, maître d’ and dishwashers take their places. Subplots bubble amid insider detail, but just as gripping is the sense of the restaurant as heightened model of every workplace.

Staff variously follow a calling, do a job or take liberties; the customers act as at once the lifeblood and, from the wobbly, almost sweaty-palmed camera’s perspective, the enemy. We jolt through the understaffed, overworked kitchen, studded with reprobates including a doobie-chuffing kitchen porter whom we follow out to pick up behind the bins; an abrupt mental-health crisis between a gangly apprentice pastry chef and his mum unfolds with lurching realism, as the latter dabs her eyes with a tea-towel, hugs it out and resumes service. Clueless, Instagram-mad mad manager Beth (Alice Feetham), the nepo hire of Jones’ partners, has overbooked tables- another ratchet in the tension of Andy’s unexplained failure to stock ingredients, which seems connected to his constant, hamster-like swilling at a plastic water bottle.

Sous-chef Carly (Vinette Robinson) and rotisseur Freeman (Ray Panthaki) embody the audience’s extremes of reaction to a hellish setup: Carly, all fluttering, bony fingers, focus on just getting through the night, even if she grows sick and tired of covering for Andy. Freeman, meanwhile, lobs profanities at his incompentent colleagues loud enough for diners to hear from the open kitchen. French newbie Camille can’t understand Graham’s scouse accent; her neighbour Tony can barely shuck an oyster, while pregnant dishwasher Sophia struggles through a mountain of dirty pans. It’s a disaster even before the engaged couple with nut allergy, Andy’s former boss, and a food critic turn up for dinner.

The soap opera premise in director Philip Baratini’s hands escalates into tooth-grinding tension, with the scalding pans, jangling service bells, and labyrinthine back passages of the restaurant transformed into a real-time obstacle course. A table of awful influencers baying for steak, a bullish, menacing bald dad on table seven, an arse-slapping gaggle of Americans: all cohere in the (literal) kitchen-sink drama spirit of proper Bri’ish soaps like Coronation Street or even Line of Duty, where the realism of such horrid people existing in this number and density takes second place to the plotting.

And despite the shameless, highly enjoyable melodrama of the film, kitchens of this ilk really are hellish. Boiling Point crams Andy’s tribulations like sardines into a 90 minute screenplay- the majority of his staff fits the mold of characters from Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares rather than a prestige restaurant or indeed prestige drama. But the operators at every level of the kitchen ‘brigade’ system portray a hostility all too real. It might lack the deeper characterisation of The Bear or the snotty, elitist cool of The Menu- but as with Andy’s unjustly paper “simple” menu, sometimes simplicity is good.