One Spoon of Chocolate
A Mouthful of Missed Opportunity
I went to see One Spoon of Chocolate at its premiere opening in Portland.
I didn’t go alone. I went with my middle daughter, and the decision to go came after a weekend that left a particular kind of residue. We had gone out dancing—one of those queer events that promises community but delivers something narrower. The music was familiar, but not for me. ABBA. “Dancing Queen.” The B-52’s “Love Shack.” A playlist, not a set. Nostalgia, but not exactly mine.
There is something about being Black in white spaces: we are expected to be fluent in everyone else’s nostalgia, even when it has never been ours.
It was a white space. A lesbian space, yes—but still white in a way that felt curated rather than shared. A true DJ is not just someone with access to songs. A true DJ knows how to mix and blend, how to take familiar ingredients and make something new. They are part chef, part conductor, part cultural translator. What we had that night felt less like a set and more like someone opening a personal archive and asking the room to dance inside it.
So when I saw there would be a set tied to this film—something rooted in Wu-Tang Clan, in ’90s hip-hop, in a sound that raised me—I was ready.
That music is home.
Hip-hop is not just music you hear. It is music you touch and feel. It is rhythm, memory, posture, weather. It lives in the body before it becomes nostalgia. I was 20 when Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) came out, and it found me during a time of transition. So when the DJ started, I felt it immediately: the nodding, the recognition, the quiet gratitude of being in a space where something familiar finally showed up.
And yet…
There was a dissonance. It was like being fed, but not fully nourished. Like the plate was familiar, but something in the seasoning was missing.
Looking around the room, seeing who else was moving to that same music—people wearing merch, people claiming the same cultural touchstones—it raised questions I couldn’t shake:
How are we all here? What does this mean to you? Do you feel this like I do? Can you?
It wasn’t about deciding who belonged there. It was about realizing I was experiencing the room from somewhere they might not be able to reach.
By the time we sat down for the film, that awareness hadn’t left. It had sharpened.
You could feel the room shifting as the story unfolded. Certain scenes landed differently depending on where you were sitting, who you were, and what you carried into the theater with you. Moments of violence, racism, and reversal drew reactions—applause in places that made me pause, awkward silence in others.
And throughout it, my daughter and I were talking.
Not to disrupt, but to process in real time. That’s how we move through stories, and how we make sense of what we’re seeing.
The difference is that I have learned to measure myself in public. My daughter has not learned that same kind of shrinking, and I am trying not to teach it to her. I know what masking can cost. I know how easily a person’s natural rhythm can be corrected out of them and renamed manners, maturity, or respectability.
For her, especially, the social contract of “sit still and be quiet” does not override the need to engage, respond, and question as things happen.
So the film wasn’t something we passively received.
It was something we moved through—together, in conversation, in a room that was also telling its own story.
And all of that—the music, the room, the reactions, the conversation—shaped what came next.
There’s a particular kind of disappointment that only comes from watching a story that almost works.
The premise of One Spoon of Chocolate is not the issue. In fact, it’s potent. A racially hostile enclave operating as a closed system of harm—one that preys on Black bodies under the guise of order and community—should feel chilling, expansive, and uncomfortably plausible. It sits in a lineage with films like Get Out, where horror emerges not from spectacle alone, but from the quiet normalization of violence.
But where that lineage relies on precision, this film leans too heavily on familiarity.
Let me be clear: this is not a dismissal of RZA. As an artist, he has long demonstrated an ability to build atmosphere, to create texture, to evoke something deeper than surface. And there are moments here—brief, flickering—where that instinct shows up. The use of origami as a symbolic throughline. The restraint in the central relationship, where intimacy is allowed to exist without being reduced to spectacle. A final image that gestures toward a reversal of power.
Those moments matter. They show intention.
But intention is not execution.
Too often, the film relies on its themes to do the heavy lifting. Racism is stated rather than revealed. Dialogue leans into the expected—slurs, declarations, the language we’ve heard before—rather than unsettling us with something quieter and more precise. The result is not that the film is offensive, but that it becomes predictable. And predictability is the death of tension.
There is also a structural issue that undermines the story’s credibility. The world is over-engineered. Key figures are too conveniently placed: the coroner’s office, the mortuary, law enforcement, and social ties all intersect in ways that feel less like an ecosystem and more like a constructed maze designed to move the plot forward. Instead of expanding the scope of the horror, it contains it. It tells us this is happening here, in this one place, among these specific people—when the more frightening truth would be that it could happen anywhere.
And then there is the question of complicity.
One of the most striking missed opportunities lies in the portrayal of those who know and choose not to act. A mother who works within the system, who has likely seen evidence before, only arrives at moral clarity when harm touches her proximity. This is not just a character flaw—it is a thematic doorway. The film brushes against it but does not step through. What could have been a sharp critique of selective empathy becomes instead a narrative convenience, a trigger to propel the protagonist forward.
The treatment of Black women within the film further reflects this imbalance. While the story centers the suffering and symbolism of Black men, Black women are often relegated to the periphery—functional rather than fully realized. Even when afforded more dignity, their roles remain tethered to the arcs of others. This absence is felt.
And yet, what lingers most is not anger—it is the sense of something unfinished.
Because the film contains ideas worth exploring. The metaphor of “one spoon of chocolate” is simple but evocative, speaking to fears of transformation, proximity, and perceived contamination. The quiet discipline of origami suggests a character capable of control, patience, and internal evolution. The final confrontation hints at a shift in power that could have been far more unsettling had it trusted silence over explanation.
This is what makes the film difficult to dismiss outright. It is not devoid of vision. It simply does not follow that vision far enough.
We are in a moment where storytelling—particularly stories rooted in race, power, and history—demands care. Not perfection, but rigor. Not just bold ideas, but the willingness to sit with them long enough to make them land. Cultural memory is not something to gesture toward; it is something to engage with fully.
And that is the ask.
Not to abandon experimentation. Not to shy away from genre. But remembering that style cannot replace substance. That homage—to blaxploitation, to kung fu cinema, to directors like Quentin Tarantino—requires more than aesthetic borrowing. It requires discipline, intention, and a deep respect for the audience’s ability to see beyond the surface.
There is a stronger film inside One Spoon of Chocolate. You can feel it trying to emerge.
And that is precisely why it matters to say: we deserve that version.
Not just as viewers, but as participants in a culture that recognizes when something is close—and refuses to settle when it falls short.
I want people to see this film.
I want it supported. I want the doors to stay open for artists like RZA to keep experimenting, to keep building, to keep reaching. That matters.
But support cannot mean silence.
Because we have seen these images before. We have lived these dynamics before. Racism, exploitation, the casual and systemic dehumanization of Black bodies—these are not new ideas to us. They are not theoretical. They are not distant.
So when those themes are brought to the screen, they require more than recognition. They require care.
Not a solution—this film is not obligated to solve anything. But it is obligated to engage its own premise fully. To push beyond what is familiar. To trust that the audience does not need to be reminded of what racism sounds like, but invited into what it feels like beneath the surface.
That is the difference between repetition and revelation.
There is a version of this film that does exactly that. You can feel it in the quieter moments—the restraint between characters, the symbolism carried in small gestures, the ending that resists over-explanation and simply… drops.
And that ending works.
It doesn’t tie everything up. It doesn’t set up a sequel. It leaves space. It lets the weight sit where it lands and trusts the audience to carry it forward with their own questions:
What happens next?
Who walks away changed—and who doesn’t?
What does power look like now?
That kind of ending lingers. It doesn’t chase you—it waits for you.
And that is why the rest of the film matters so much.
Because when you end on that kind of note, you are asking your audience to stay with you. To think. To feel. To wrestle. And if you’re going to ask that of us, then everything leading up to it has to be just as intentional.
We don’t need perfection.
But we do need more than what we’ve already seen.
We need the full version of the story that is trying to be told.
And we’re not wrong for expecting it.