Labyrinthine corridors connect the sprawling worlds within The Grill, a traditional eatery by the hustle and bustle of Times Square in “La Cocina.” Open one door, and you are in the kitchen, a boiler room of rage and frustration tamed only by the often frail bonds of camaraderie; turn a corner, and you’re spat straight onto the busy restaurant floor, where waitresses in matching outfits move like a ballet between tables occupied with birthday boys and men as foreign to politeness as hawks are to the sea. Down a level, and you’re by the quiet offices where cigarette ashes stain old documents, and money is carefully stashed in plastic paper bags. 
READ MORE: Rooney Mara To Star In Alonso Ruizpalacios’ New NYC Kitchen Movie ‘La Cocina’
The frenzied world of a restaurant has long been a cultural staple, from Gordon Ramsay’s infamous idiot sandwich to a friendly rat who dreams of becoming a chef puppeteering a garbage boy. The trope seems to be having a particularly popular moment, with Jeremy Allen White’s heartthrob cook in “The Bear” leading hoards of young people to chant “yes, chef” and films like Philip Barantini’s “Boiling Point” and Mark Mylod’s “The Menu” welcoming audiences into the madness of a kitchen — be it through sheer chaos or veering sociopathic levels of order. 
The titular kitchen in “La Cocina,” Alonso Ruizpalacios’ adaptation of the eponymous play by Tony Meneses, is planted firmly in the former, a chaotic hub turned home to dozens of illegal immigrants trying to make it in New York. Ruizpalacios’ film follows a specially hectic day at the restaurant as two new women join the team, a couple is faced with a life-changing decision and the restaurant manager is tasked with solving the mystery of who took a large sum of cash from the tills the night before. 
One of the many suspects at play is Pedro (Raúl Briones Carmona), a Mexican cook with a penchant for kicking off brawls who prances around the kitchen as if he owns the whole goddamned place, tugging and pulling and hugging others while carefully choosing words that come out as careless — instigation at its finest. The façade tentatively comes down whenever he comes across Julia (Rooney Mara), the American waitress carrying his child, an unplanned yet much-desired baby for Pedro, an unplanned baby for Julia. 
The choice of the two faces tugs at the strings of Pedro’s dreams of belonging. At the same time, it offers Julia a brief window into a life oblivious to what awaits her outside of the cocoon of The Grill. Briones and Mara are perfect dance partners in this waltz between reality and possibility, stark opposites and doomed lovers united by a hope they know to be foolish. Ruizpalacios turns the figurative issues of their relationship physical, playing with notions of hot and cold and often framing the duo through physical obstacles — shelves, doors, and curtains.
Briones reunites with Ruizpalacios to once again prod at the natural imbalance of power the duo dissected in their previous collaboration, the 2021 docudrama “A Cop Movie.” While their earlier joint effort looked at the dysfunctional life of a cop in Mexico City, their latest employs the microcosmos of The Grill to investigate the blurry lines between a yearning to belong and forced assimilation. 
To conduct such an exercise, the Mexican director looks at not only the vast cultural barrier that separates his own Romeo and Juliet, with Pedro punching walls while lamenting his beloved’s inability to understand his native Spanish — and therefore, her inability to truly understand him — but also makes great use of the large ensemble cast that rovers around the duo, a group that stands for the many faces and stories of migration. “America is not a country,” Pedro barks at the manager, born in the United States to a Mexican family and unable to miss an opportunity to lick the boots of a white man; at lunch, one of the other  Mexican men working the kitchen boasts about only going out with güeras, a slang for fair-skinned women he describes as “God intended,” while their dark-skinned counterparts are made out of “scraps.” 
In juggling their stories, Ruizpalacios finds rare moments of tenderness, too, as when Motell Gyn Foster’s Nonzo serenades a young girl who left her Mexican hometown with little but the flaky promise of a job at The Grill or when a queer Moroccan woman talks about how lucky she feels to have finally managed to woo her girlfriend. It is also where the director stumbles in masking the film’s theatrical origins, with overstretched — and, at times, overperformed — dialogue stunting the film’s pace. Still, the mishap is easy to slight when there is so much merit in the director’s grasp of the aches of displacement and the overly romantic yet very welcome idea of love as a balm able to tend to such wounds. Even when, of course, it doesn’t. [A-]