Director Peter Strickland has made his fair share of rather peculiar films, with titles such as In Fabric, Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy under his belt, and his latest Flux Gourmet is no exception.
The film takes place at an institute as we follow a group of experimental performance artists who do something known as sonic catering. Despite the name suggesting that they do all the cooking for everyone's favourite blue hedgehog, that's far from the reality of it.
Sonic catering involves extracting disturbing sounds from a multitude of foods and making something artistic of it. And in fact, Strickland is himself part of his own sonic catering band. But perhaps he didn't need to let everyone else in on the world of sonic catering and it would be better off unknown.
The film's sonic catering band is made up of Elle di Elle (Strickland's frequent collaborator Fatma Mohamed), Billy Rubin (Sex Education's Asa Butterfield) and Lamina Propria (Ariane Labed) and they're struggling to come up with a name for their band causing power struggles amongst them and it only gets worse when caught up with the institute's director Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie). Their dysfunctional dynamic is somewhat interesting to watch, helped by the fact that the cast all give good performances in one of the few redeeming qualities of the film.
Flux Gourmet is not everyone's cup of tea and it certainly wasn't for me. Peter Strickland has taken my cup of tea and smashed it into smithereens to try and get a nice sound out of it. Strickland tries to make a satire poking fun at pretentious, pompous art and in doing so he has managed to create his own piece of pretentious, pompous art himself. Was that his intention behind making Flux Gourmet? Possibly it was, but we'll never know.
It's unique for sure, but the film feels so far removed from anything that when you try to look a little deeper beyond the deeply bizarre and absurd surface, there's not a whole lot left to find. Everything just feels too out of place to enjoy.
Strickland does succeed in creating an environment and an atmosphere that leaves you feeling uncomfortable and in discomfort, and there are some pieces of really excellent and gorgeous cinematography here. But it never amounts to too much when what you're watching is just so bizarre and makes absolutely no sense. There's far more talk of flatulence than a one hundred- and eleven-minute-long film needs.
Flux Gourmet releases in UK cinemas on September 30th.
