The directorial debut of Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya unfolds in a dystopian near-future London, a city in which the division between the haves and the have-nots has deepened to such an extent that society seems to be simmering on the brink of a civil war. The flashpoint is the Kitchen, a condemned housing estate that nods to Blade Runner-style future slums and the powder-keg banlieue of Romain Gavras’s 2022 film Athena. Threatened with eviction, the residents barricade themselves against repeated assaults by armed police. Solitary Izi (Kane Robinson) lives in the Kitchen but plans to escape. Then he encounters Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman), a 12-year-old whose mother has just died and who is looking for someone to fill the space in his life.

The rich world-building is the picture’s main asset: the film looks fantastic, with its screaming neons and precipitous concrete cliff faces. The space in which the story unfolds is rather more distinctive than the story itself, which covers familiar territory and loses some energy as the film progresses. Still, Robinson and Bannerman are excellent, warily stepping around each other’s expectations and weighing up the cost of allowing themselves to care.

• In select cinemas and on Netflix