A smog of displacement and destiny envelops the opening minutes of La Cocina. As a homeless man on the streets of Manhattan waxes poetic about the inescapable pull of Times Square — in his words, New York City’s beating heart — a wide-eyed young woman smiles and nods politely. She does not speak English, and like most people in the city, she has somewhere to be. Estela (Anna Díaz), quite literally fresh off the boat, has spent this hazy winter morning navigating an unfamiliar concrete jungle in search of The Grill, the upscale eatery that — like the block on which it stands — pumps droves of diverse diners and dreamers through its gaudy arterials; tourists enter at the front door, undocumented workers at the back. Estela is determined to secure a place in this pulsating system. Her way in is half-remembered relative Pedro (Raúl Briones), one of the restaurant’s beleaguered Mexican cooks (who is also a ticking time bomb). She will get her wish through twists of fate both cruel and fortuitous, but her first day on the eponymous kitchen’s line will be another employee’s last. One of the registers is $823.78 short, and The Grill’s predatory owner Mr. Rashid (Oded Fehr) — siccing his feckless managers upon the staff — is out to extract a confession from the culprit by the time they close for the night.

Adapted from Arthur Wesker’s eponymous 1957 play (monikered in English), Alonso Ruizpalacios’ pressure-cooker melodrama explodes its perspective from the new hire to the rest of its harried ensemble with whipcrack efficiency and snowballing efficacy. Estela has barely finished her interview with the porcine poser Luis (Eduardo Olmos) when his office is invaded by a flurry of interlacing crises; money is missing, someone broke the soda dispenser, Pedro pulled a knife on a fellow cook the night before, etc., etc. The camera glides through The Grill’s shadowy hallways, various characters taking turns in the spotlight as they all prepare for the lunchtime rush. 

An American server, Julia (Rooney Mara), is told as soon as she arrives that she is also covering the night shift, whether she likes it or not. This throws a wrench in her arrangements for a secret abortion in the afternoon. Pedro, the baby’s father, is warned by the gravel-voiced, pugnacious chef (whose mannerisms will send chills of recognition down the spine of many a service worker) that he has three strikes left before he’s cast out to fend for himself. In this calm before the storm, Pedro and Julia steal moments together; they pretend to meet for the first time as she cleans the lobster tank (attempting to ignore him), he tells her of the humble origins of lobster as “poor man’s meat” (elevated to delicacy when the wealthy went slumming), he hands her an envelope with money for the abortion (about $800), he tries to talk her out of it, they fight, they make up, and they fantasize about the future as she jerks him off in the walk-in fridge, fluorescent lights puncturing the film’s stark black-and-white palette with a cerulean glow. 

When shit finally hits the fan — angry customers pile up, servers and cooks berate each other over botched and missing orders, new hires are pushed off the deep end, and the kitchen floor floods with cherry coke — the anxious distension of the film’s approach achieves its first delirious, anguished pay-off (dinner still looms once the dust has settled). Throughout the proceedings, Ruizpalacios strikes a remarkable balance between psychology and spatiality, superimposing his screenplay’s carefully meted strands of escalating conflict onto the demands of the service industry — and the various forms of precarity that pass through it — with clarity and empathy. He divides the characters with visible and metaphysical boundaries, using the architecture of both front and back of house to confine, provoke, and stratify. But the film is also unbound from any clear temporal setting — smoke breaks are taken both inside and out, the diegetic soundtrack and tacky decor are slyly retro-modern, employees communicate with the outside world via payphone, the servers use a desktop computer to punch in their orders, the kitchen runs on paper chits — but this air of detachment and artifice works largely in La Cocina‘s favor. In these desolate, pressurized crevices of The Grill’s unfeeling maw, the authentic joins forces with the absurd. 

A powerful, bewildering work of despair and dejection — evoking that mixture of irritability and resignation that anyone who works in this business will intimately know — La Cocina stands apart from the recent glut of restaurants staged as battlegrounds through its aesthetic command of the workplace, its surrealist touches, and its cohesion of conflicting situational urgencies. It’s a film that, ironically, refuses to view its world in black-and-white, zeroing in on the gray areas of human behavior — our failures and foibles, the constant frictions of our unreconcilable experiences — as it builds toward a final note of intervention: aesthetic, supernatural, divine, or perhaps something else entirely. 

DIRECTOR: Alonso Ruizpalacios;  CAST: Raúl Briones, Rooney Mara, Anna Diaz, Laura Gómez;  DISTRIBUTOR: WILLA;  IN THEATERS: October 25;  RUNTIME: 2 hr. 19 min.

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