Content Warning: One Spoon of Chocolate features several instances of violence against Black bodies that may prove triggering for sensitive viewers.
Musician RZA made his full feature directorial debut with 2012’s The Man with the Iron Fists, a Shaw Brothers-style actioner, and has since released two more, drama Love Beats Rhymes (2017) and crime thriller Cut Throat City (2020). Now, however, RZA is set to make a bigger shift in his filmography with One Spoon of Chocolate, having its world premiere in the Escape from Tribeca section of Tribeca Film Festival 2025, with a story inspired by true events that straddles the line between grindhouse blacksploitation tale and harrowing grounded thriller. Utilizing a varied cinematography style and powered by provocative narrative beats, One Spoon of Chocolate is a raw, grotesque, and often hard to stomach satirical thriller for the ways in which the highest highs of broken logic start to appear plausible in the real world.
Between good behavior and a crowded prison, veteran Randy “Unique” Joneson (Shameik Moore) is offered early parole and is released to a halfway house in New York. Thanks to a sympathetic parole officer, Beem (Blair Underwood), Unique is permitted to transfer his parole to Ohio where his cousin and only family, Ramsee (RJ Cyler), resides. Unique is excited to reconnect with Ramsee, but on his first day back, the pair run afoul of Jimmy McLeoud’s (Harry Goodwins) goons and the minor scuffle leads to an escalation with major charges. All Unique wants is to be a part of the society that he protected for three tours, but the people of Karensville, Ohio, have different ideas, leaving Unique with a choiceless choice that may just shift life for all in the process.
Written by RZA (The Man with the Iron Fists series), One Spoon of Chocolate informs you of exactly the kind of film it is from the start as the filmmaker opens with a shot of a young man (Isaiah R. Hill) walking by the side of the road, everything but his letterman’s jacket in black-and-white. This choice signifies what matters in the moment, that this individual is likely a high schooler, he’s alone, and the jacket is a crimson red. This is not the first time One Spoon will play with monochrome and color, but here, it reminds of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) which featured a young girl in a red coat amid a monochrome world, a choice made to ensure that the audience would see her coat, process the person wearing it, and feel the full brunt of what it means when we see said coat on a pile of others. RZA doesn’t make such a cinematic choice with the jacket coming back up, but this is a choice, nonetheless, that captures the audience’s attention and generates dread. This child, full of life, is coated in monochrome aside from his jacket and it’s not until the words “based on a true story” appear in yellow that the rest of the screen fills with color. In just a few seconds, possibly more than a minute, RZA has set a harbinger, one that will pay off to the observant before the end of the film, and it will make your blood run cold. In these scenes of monochrome, cinematographer Brandon Cox (Four Rivers Six Ranges: The Untold Story of Tibet) often includes a great deal of haze and grain, making the sequences appear almost like restored or rescued footage, thereby instilling a sense that what’s happening isn’t of this time, except the costumes, the tech, the language — everything — firmly grounds One Spoon into the present. A present which is volatile to young black individuals, ready to brandish punishment for the sheer act of living. Once more, in scenes of violence, sometimes the color goes away aside from the red and it upends one’s stomach to observe.
Shameik Moore as Unique in ONE SPOON OF CHOCOLATE. Photo courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival 2025.
But where it doesn’t, where the choice of color within a scene or the display of light from an external source doesn’t play in monochrome, Cox and RZA opt for either a realistic look or one with hyperstylization leering within the frame. For instance, the introduction of Unique in prison is clean, the walls of his cell — white, the yellow on the phone book Unique practices his punches — vibrant, and the blue-white of the sky as Unique walks away from the prison — inviting. The danger established in the opening sequence isn’t present here, albeit visible in the audible threat from the requisition guard who tells Unique he’ll see him soon (a larger issue as it relates to the prison system as failing the inmates), so the cinematography doesn’t shift away from realism. Later, however, when Jimmy grabs a small team to track down Unique and Ramsee, the lights surrounding their facility utilizes greens, reds, and purples, conveying an origin point for the distortion of reality and from which all the horrors come. This is what keeps One Spoon from abandoning its grounded aspects, enabling the true terror of this story to emanate, terrors that RZA structures in such a way as to ensure that the audience has a chance to recognize them as heightened while remaining so close to truth that one struggles to maintain focus on what terrible acts occur to the characters.
This is where the more grindhouse elements come in. Not just the visual influences, but the naming conventions, stylistic choices, and costumes. RZA’s not going for subtilty when Unique moves to live with Ramsee in Karensville. That name “Karen” has precise weight and meaning toward a white woman who weaponizes her whiteness to get her way, typically against a Black person or person of color. This is a tactic going back to the Black Panic that created the Klu Klux Klan and keeps their mentality in vogue. We, the audience, know from the moment we see the sign identifying his hometown that Unique’s in for trouble and it’s only a matter of time until the script turns violent. If there are some who find it strange to see such racism depicted in a Northern state, racism proliferates anywhere regardless of Civil War affiliation and, after the 2024 election and the lies pushed by then-Ohio Senator/now-VP JD Vance regarding Haitian immigrants eating pets. If fear is a mind killer, xenophobia is a brain worm controlling cognitive function and there’s plenty of it to go around regardless of location within the United States or the world. Back to Karensville, RZA makes a hilarious choice for a uniform worn by Jimmy and his goons — a Crown Royale-like bag as a hood, white knit collared shirt, and khakis akin to those worn by the racists from Charlottesville, Virginia, — creating a direct correlation between the idiots of the South with those in the North, hilarious only for the satisfying way RZA opts to deliver grindhouse-style comeuppance. But the thing that solidifies, at least for this reviewer, why such horrible things happen and are allowed to happen is that One Spoon takes place within the cinematic universe, or at least one tangential to, that of Quentin Tarantino. This is partially due to the appearance of a character smoking Red Apple cigarettes, but is solidified when Unique opens up a gift provided by said-character and his face is immediately bathed in a yellow-gold light. Unlike Ving Rhames’s Marsellus Wallace (Pulp Fiction) and his briefcase, we know what it is that Unique sees; however, just like Marsellus, Unique is no bitch and RZA ensures we know as such (the character is a military vet with three tours under his belt, after all). Also, for context, and another piece of that sweet, sweet grindhouse style, Unique shares more in common with Nicolas Cage’s Cameron Poe (Con Air) than Louis Gara (Jackie Brown), making him the sort of down-on-his-luck protagonist that audience’s can rally behind, especially when push comes to shove and Unique goes on the offensive.
There are going to be things that audiences find objectionable within One Spoon of Chocolate and, chances are, they’d be justified. If not for incorporating grindhouse elements, things that appear to exploit the pain and suffering of others, then the aspects of the narrative that come off as observing a lynching and the unflinching way that RZA captures them would shatter an audience rather than prime them for what comes next. Some audiences may find the depiction of the white characters as conniving, violent, morally corrupt, deplorable, and problematic, except, in a story centering violence perpetrated against the Black community, there’s typically one race responsible for that. And if we’re talking a Blacksploitation film, yeah, the white folks are going to be the bad guys. But the item that’s most going to bother audiences is the ending and, as someone aware of RZA’s affinity for martial arts cinema, this ending is as loaded as that of Fist of Fury (1972). A spoiler-filled review would make a meal of what it means, but, for now, just know that if how it ends it bothers you, consider why and what it means in the scope of RZA’s narrative. Consider that subtilty isn’t the point or the desire. Consider that violence just begets more violence. Consider that affecting change only requires one person to make a choice and the ripple from that choice can either uplift or devastate, but it will create change all the same.
Screened during Tribeca Film Festival 2025.
For more information, head to the official Tribeca Film Festival One Spoon of Chocolate webpage.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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