La Cocina ★★★★

Released: 28th March 2025

Directed: Alonso Ruizpalacios

Starring: Raúl Briones Carmona, Rooney Mara, Anna Diaz, Soundos Mosbah, Motell Foster, Eduardo Olmos

The time periods are different, but the parallels between La Cocina and Oscar-winning film The Brutalist are clear: both films centring on the immigration experience in the USA, and more specifically how dehumanising it can be and how false the so-called American Dream really is. Both films also begin with scenes on a boat, but where The Brutalist finds grandeur and promise in its mammoth surroundings (however short-lived they might be), La Cocina judders uncomfortably in slow-motion and black-and-white, capturing New York as a haunting ghost town, much less a place of ripe potential. For the next two hours plus, director and writer Alonso Ruizpalacios continues in this unerringly bleak and unforgettable way.

After this eerie opening, where NYC is seen as a bustling throng of disconnected people and cultures, La Cocina settles into its titular kitchen, “The Grill”. It’s a large, busy tourist restaurant in Times Square, with a mind-bending amount of employees and a manipulative manager called Rashid (Oded Fehr). “The Grill” is a melting pot for different cultures—from white Americans, Latin Americans, and Arabs—and a microcosm of America as a whole. Rich tourists dine in peace; white employees have tough public-facing roles, but not in comparison to the backroom staff; non-white people slum it in the kitchens, preparing food and washing up for little pay and false promises of citizenship papers.

If you’ve ever seen The Bear, you’ll know what sort of stress levels to expect, but even so, La Cocina moves at a breakneck speed that is impossible to get free from. Importantly, as this is a 139-minute film and not a TV show with episodes, Ruizpalacios shows a fantastic eye for tempo, knowing exactly when to dial it back and when to ramp it up. The frenetic chaos of the kitchen is vital to La Cocina, but so are the quieter, reflective moments that sizzle with emotion. Backing this impressive and ever-shifting pace are nifty editing by Yibran Asuad, an operatic, sweeping original score by Tomás Barreiro, and beautiful cinematography by Juan Pablo Ramirez, who lenses a confined space in such fascinating ways. Some stylistic choices don’t always work—quite why La Cocina is in black-and-white is a bit of a head scratcher—but more often than not, they land rich with symbolism.

La Cocina has a myriad of characters, but at its centre is Pedro (Raúl Briones Carmona, who gives a career-defining performance), a Mexican cook who has been working at “The Grill” for around five years. He is in a relationship with Julia (Rooney Mara), one of the waitresses, but tensions in their relationship rise when Julia falls pregnant, opening doors to other resentments and divides. Ruizpalacios doesn’t handle this subplot with the greatest skill—Pedro puts an uncomfortable pressure on Julia not to have an abortion—but it feeds well enough into Pedro’s character as a whole. The divides are everywhere, not just between the couple, but throughout the kitchen, between races and cultures, and even within.

After an assured opening, La Cocina initially seems to lose itself, but the increasingly far-fetched tone and slapstick energy works. One particular scene involves a leaking drinks machine, resulting in an unforgettable one-shot take that sees all the kitchen staff wading through sticky, syrupy soda as it floods the workspace. Like Pedro’s own life, everything spirals further and further out of control until nothing of worth can be salvaged. It is bleak and pessimistic, with a little twang of beauty and hope, and a rich meal of a film that stands as an equal to other recent immigration-centred dramas such as The Brutalist.