RZA on One Spoon of Chocolate: “Did you feel uncomfortable? Good.”

RZA discusses his latest action-thriller in a post-screening Q&A at the Music Box Theatre.

The packed theater at the Midwest debut of One Spoon of Chocolate (2025) was not the typical movie-going site. Despite theaters not fully recovering from the plunge of domestic ticket sales during the pandemic, the historic Music Box Theatre was full of excited cheers from a standing crowd, welcoming writer and director RZA to the stage as he shot T-shirts their way from a T-shirt cannon. 

The rapper, producer and leader of the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan, formed in the ‘90s, has been a longtime film lover — as heard by the non-music samplings from kung-fu movies in his music. In addition to composing and acting for several films, RZA is now a filmmaker himself. The fourth major feature film he has directed was screened as a part of Beyond Fest’s Chicago festival.

Beyond Fest is the highest-attended genre film festival in the United States and is typically held in Los Angeles. They collaborated with the Music Box to bring the festival to Chicago earlier this month for “four days of all-killer-no-filler cinematic chaos and carnage,” wrote the Music Box in a press release. 

“Chicago is an incredible city and their reaction to the program, the community and also the guests was really warm and positive and encouraging,” said Evrim Ersoy, head of programming at Beyond Fest, who hosted a post-screening Q&A with RZA. “It’s such an interesting, unique, different film, and it was a real joy to be able to host it at the festival.”

The film was shown on a 35mm print. “That really made it special because there’s something special about the film and the way he shot it. It really pops and so it was great to see it with an absolutely full audience in that room,” said Ersoy.

One Spoon of Chocolate follows Army veteran Unique’s (Shameik Moore) arrival to a seemingly normal American suburb shortly after his release from prison — where he was falsely charged with assault for trying to protect a neighbor. Thanks to his understanding parole officer (Blair Underwood), Unique relocates from a veteran shelter to Karensville, Ohio, where his cousin and only family Ramsee (RJ Cyler) lives.

After a confrontation in the public basketball court, Unique and Ramsee become the target of a gang of Midwest hicks led by the sheriff’s son (Harry Goodwins) and his fellow white supremacist goons. 

As their violence continues, Unique suspects the gang, the sheriff (Michael Harney) and other town officials are involved in something far more diabolically racist — including the recent disappearances of local young Black men. 

While hiding from police — his new, well-meaning, white woman friend (Paris Jackson) lets him stay in her basement — he devises a plan, seeking revenge on the town’s corrupt racists. 

When the screen went black, the audience resumed their cheering and standing ovation as they re-welcomed RZA to the stage for a post-screening Q&A with Ersoy. Towards the start of the Q&A, RZA asked the audience: “At any point in this film, did you feel uncomfortable?”

“Good,” he said after various ‘Yes!’ replies bounced throughout the theater. “I wanted to hit emotional beats and uncomfortability.”

“It was an interesting movie to see at a premiere,” said Mason Wagoner, a second-year DePaul film student who attended the screening and Q&A. “The tone is so all over the place … there were times where people were confused whether to laugh or not.”

The film is a blend of genres and film eras, taking its cartoonishly-evil antagonists seriously and splicing comedy between its ever-relevant message. 

It’s reminiscent of ‘70s exploitation films, specifically blaxploitation (Black people exploitation films) and hicksploitation (Southern and rural white American exploitation films). These were low-budget films designed to maximize profit, often targeting specific audiences and exploited cultural trends and stereotypes, but ended up leaving a meaningful impression in American popular culture and sometimes gained cult followings. They often featured taboo content, such as excessive gore, violence, drug use and sex.

One Spoon of Chocolate also contains remnants of kung-fu cinema and ‘80s rom-coms, as well as other references like the Tarantino-verse’s Red Apple cigarettes. 

During the Q&A, RZA discussed the process of bringing the film to life — including working with Quentin Tarantino, who he met with when finishing up the draft for One Spoon of Chocolate and described as a mentor.

“After I got [the script] done, I reached out and was like, ‘I realize that some of my sh*t exists in some of your world, right? So do you mind if the Red Apples pop up in my shit?,” RZA said at the Q&A. “He was like, ‘Yeah, of course.’ He saw the resemblance.”

RZA went on to describe “cinematic rhythm” and his philosophy as a filmmaker and artist as a whole.

“You should be able to get a laugh, you should be able to get — hopefully — a tear, you should get a question, you should even get a moment to settle down,” he said at the Q&A. “A great song — to me — it has to have an emotional content that leads you to the hook. That’s the songwriter rhythm you see in my film.”

The film’s stylistic synthesis also reflects the sampling prevalent in hip-hop.

“Hip-hop has its foundation in sampling,” said RZA at the Q&A. “The same thing in cinema to me, is like, ‘Okay, study, study, study,’ and even though you have your own story and your own characters, there are styles and techniques that you can use to tell stories. And so, I decided to put a spoon full of different things.”

“You know, I think creative people, we are inspired by other creative people, and he’s just so nice, so down to earth, and so cool and clearly curious and a fan of the things that he’s working on and the people he’s working with,” said John Otterbacher, a filmmaker, educator and small time Music Box programmer who attended the screening and met RZA at Beyond Fest. 

The film has received mixed, but relatively positive, reviews from early audiences. As of April 17 it has an average IMDb rating of 7.5/10 and an average Letterboxd rating of 3.2/5.

“I thought [the film] was very fun. I don’t think it was perfect by any means,” said Kathryn Wille, a second-year DePaul film student who also attended the screening and Q&A. “But I remember the experience being, overall, pretty positive.”

“[The film] tries a lot of things and it’s successful most of the time, but it’s not consistently successful … Sometimes there were strange editing choices that didn’t fit, while other times these kinds of weird edits did fit,” Wagoner said. “I liked the ending though because it sort of took a cliche and took it in a different direction and it knew when to end.”

The film’s U.S. theatrical release date is set for May 1.

“Everyone should go see the film when it comes out and support it,” Ersoy said. “Independent cinema lives and dies by the audience and I feel like the audience taking a chance on One Spoon of Chocolate will really make a difference.”

Header Image by John Otterbacher