Philip Barantini’s single-take kitchen drama is as tense as its reputation, and Stephen Graham and Vinette Robinson are the reason. The script keeps adding crises it does not need, and the last stretch tips into melodrama, but the shift itself is worth sitting through.
Andy Jones (Stephen Graham) is head chef at a restaurant in east London on the Friday before Christmas, and Boiling Point is one service there, ninety-two minutes long, filmed in a single continuous take. Philip Barantini directs and wrote it with James Cummings. It is a good film about work under pressure, with a lead performance we would happily watch again tomorrow, and it also has a script that keeps piling things onto the pass until we could see the writers’ hands. We recommend it, with that reservation.
Barantini’s one continuous take is doing real work. Matthew Lewis carries the camera from the kitchen to the dining room and back, following a plate, then a waitress, then a bin bag, and the film gets its rhythm from that circuit: every time the doors swing we cross from a room where people are shouting to one where people are being charmed. There is no cut to hide behind and no cut to rest in. Alex Fountain is credited as editor; if there are joins, we did not find them.
Graham plays Andy as a man who has been behind since he woke up. He arrives on the phone to his son, apologising. He walks into a hygiene inspection he has not prepared for and watches his rating drop from five to three because the paperwork he promised to do is not done. He has not slept, or not much. We spent the first twenty minutes hunched forward wanting him to sit down, and the feeling did not fade, because Graham keeps the sweat and the shaking hands going without ever asking us to admire them. When he finally raises his voice it is at the wrong person, as it usually is.
Vinette Robinson’s Carly, the sous chef, is running the kitchen while Andy runs from it, and Robinson does something harder than Graham: she plays competence, which is not showy, and lets us see what it costs. She has one scene alone with Andy where she says what she has been thinking for months, and for those two minutes the film stops being a thriller and becomes a film about how much a good employee will forgive. Around her, Alice May Feetham’s Beth has taken too many bookings and knows it. Hannah Walters holds pastry together. Lauryn Ajufo’s Andrea, a young waitress, draws the table that wants to be rude to her, and the scene in which she has to stand there and take it is the plainest in the film and one of its best.
Then Jason Flemyng arrives as Alastair Skye, a chef off the television with silver hair and a smile that means he wants something, and Lourdes Faberes as Sara Southworth, a critic, at his side. Flemyng is good, but this is where the writing begins to show. Every table in the place has a crisis: a proposal, an influencer, a critic to impress, a man who wants his steak well done with chips. Real kitchens have bad nights, but this one has been booked by a screenwriter. Several of the confrontations are written as speeches and delivered in the walk-in fridge, the only place in the building quiet enough to hear them.
The last quarter of an hour takes a turn we will not describe. It is the part most critics were unsure about and we are with them: the film has spent seventy-five minutes earning its tension honestly, through timing and faces, and then reaches for something bigger and less true. Aaron May and David Ridley’s score, absent for most of the film, comes in here and tells us how to feel, which by then we did not need.
Aimee Meek’s kitchen is a real kitchen: no room to pass behind someone without a hand on their back, a pass barely wider than the plates on it. Karen Smyth’s whites start clean and do not stay so. The single take suits a restaurant service better than it suits most subjects, Victoria included, because neither can be paused. That is one of the few ideas in Boiling Point the film does not say out loud.
Eat before you watch it. You will not want to afterwards, and you will be kinder to whoever brings your food for at least a week.
