The Kitchen, God’s Wife: Berloff Doesn’t Bring the Heat in Halting Melodrama

Hell may as yet have no fury like a woman scorned, but the alchemy of Andrea Berloff’s directorial debut The Kitchen rarely raises above a simmer despite the tense elements and meaty narrative at its disposal. Based on a 2015 comic series by Ollie Masters and Ming Doyle, Berloff, who was notably one of the scribes behind F. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton, the pulpy source material certainly lands squarely in the ‘female of the species is more deadly than the male’ scenario. In a set-up which compares unfavorably to Steve McQueen’s 2018 slow burn genre piece Widows, itself based on a 1980s UK mini-series, three wives of Irish mobsters in 1978 Hell’s Kitchen are forced to scrabble together resources when their husbands get locked up for four years following a failed robbery.…

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