[imagesource: Vertigo]
Boiling Point is so immersive and raw that anyone who has worked in the service industry might experience a few anxiety triggers.
Complete with horrendous customers, impossible managers, and sorry-for-themselves staff, the drama that unfolds in this kitchen-set feels exactly like an accelerating panic attack.
And the low-budget, one-shot directing and cinematography style just makes these workaday realities all the more intimate and all-feeling.
Taking his cue from other one-shot films (like Birdman), director Philip Barantini is basically expanding on his 2019 short film of the same name, but putting this version in a different, possibly more intense kitchen.
The Independent has the lowdown:
Captured in a single, 90-minute take (with none of Birdman’s hidden edits), Boiling Point crosses back and forth over the invisible line that always bisects these kinds of spaces, dividing the public sphere from the private, the smiling face of hospitality from the quiet panic attack in the backroom.
The film is always on the move, and yet somehow oppressively claustrophobic, as the tension gradually builds to the point of no return suggested by its title.
You can see from the opening minutes that head chef Andy Jones, played by Stephen Graham (from the original short), is close to completely exploding.
But his failures are never his own as he constantly passes the buck of blame and shame onto his subordinate, Gordon Ramsay-style:
The actor pressurises his character’s emotions until they burst out in individual micro-eruptions, sometimes as subtle as the twitch of his mouth – a sign that something bigger, and more destructive, is yet to come.
Here’s the starter:
The heat can only rise in the sweaty, confined space of a kitchen.
It’s hard not to cheer along then with Andy’s sous-chef Carly (played by Vinette Robinson) as she concludes with “I do not get paid enough to deal with this s***”.
Boiling Point is currently available to watch on digital platforms.
[source:independent]
