Boiling Point - Review
Boiling Point - Review
Marketed as a ticking time bomb filmed in one single take, Boiling Point’s restaurant-set drama appears to intend to induce a state of stress and anxiety in its viewer, with many critics comparing it to the Safdie Brothers’ film Uncut Gems. However, whilst a noble effort to shed light on the somewhat overlooked pressures of working within the hospitality industry, the drama itself mostly comes off as either predictable or mundane despite its excellent leads and some fleeting moments of genuine emotion.
I have worked in the industry for just over 4 years and within that time filled in as a waiter, a glass-collector, a bartender and even as a kitchen porter. For this reason I sense that I must not be the target audience of this film because if I wanted to see a barrage of rude customers, untrained staff, overly polite and entirely impractical managers, suspect hygiene practices and a facade of respect, then I would simply go to work. Whilst this could possibly be effective for someone outside of my experiences who has not been desensitised to this stuff, the relative mundanity of the film’s plot rarely matches the frenetic energy of the handheld camera and thus, left me feeling detached from the drama rather than a part of it.
Nevertheless, there are moments of noteworthy incident that you would not find on a typical Saturday night at your local restaurant but even these lack a punch due to their predictable nature. Now, predictable is not necessarily bad, take as example the aforementioned Uncut Gems - many of the decisions made by Adam Sandler’s addict gambler are entirely foreseeable, or perhaps even inevitable, but they all maintain a certain intensity and fascination for the viewer. You can’t quite turn your eyes away as every ounce of your being is urging him to not go another step down the hole yet with each bad decision, your hope is
crushed once more and the anxiety and discomfort is turned up a notch. However, here, there is none of that as you have not been brought into the drama prior and thus, when the characters do ultimately reach their boiling point, all one can see is the machinations of a screenplay rather than a genuine human drama. It would be wrong to say that the performances themselves feel false as Stephen Graham as head chef and his second-in-command Vinette Robinson have great chemistry and convey a history together that need not be explained but is felt. However, this only makes it all the more disappointing that the bigger, climatic beats of the story just do not land - the most egregious of which being the ending which feels unearned and rather like a student who has ran out of ideas.
Despite all this, alongside the notable lead performances, there are also a few fleeting moments of life in and amongst the grey banality that is this film’s screenplay. In particular, there is a microplot that occurs between the pastry chef and her young apprentice that is genuinely heartbreaking yet worryingly resonant. It is a moment that, whilst minor in the scope of the overall plot, potently represents that the true labour in hospitality is emotional, with the chefs whites you wear as much a mask and a facade as they are a uniform.
Ultimately, what the film does seem to understand is that the true task of a hospitality worker is not really the cooking or the serving but is the mental gymnastics one has to do to continue smiling and not boil over the edge. Nevertheless, its well-meaning message and fantastic leads cannot save it from what is an underdeveloped script that is too mundane to be anxiety-inducing and too predictable to be thrilling.