Flux Gourmet review – culinary black comedy is mostly inedible

Across a series of genre-inflected films that earned plaudits within the British critical spectrum, Peter Strickland has built a reputation as a detail-obsessed filmmaker of weird and offbeat stories that reference his love for cinema’s B-movie lineage, be it giallo (Berberian Sound Studio), softcore erotica (The Duke of Burgundy), or supernatural terror (In Fabric). Flux Gourmet is not so directly tied into any particular pastiche of a pre-existing genre, but it still follows much of the same offbeat, art-school mood that has long been Strickland’s stock-in-trade.

The problem with that mood is that, for all of Strickland’s meticulous cinematic worlds – with careful attention placed on sound design, aesthetic composition, music, and lighting – his writing (or his thematic thinking, at least) is still essentially that of a sixth former who has just learnt about the concept of genre, and is massively keen to subvert it at every chance.

Set in an culinary music institution where experimental groups are given one-month residencies to make music out of cooking, we follow the travails of the in-house journalist Stones (Makis Papadimitriou), tasked with recording each visiting group’s process. Stones suffers from extensive flatulence and has a testy relationship with the leader of the incoming group, Elle (Strickland regular Fatma Mohamed). Elle’s dictatorial temperament, borderline abusing her bandmates (Asa Butterfield and Ariane Labed) as well as the institute’s director (Gwendoline Christie) sets everything heading for an inevitable car crash. Much of it plays like Throbbing Gristle as led by Gordon Ramsey.

The close-miced shots of food being cut up, blended, murdered, and fed through oscillators, ring modulators, flangers and delays are hugely pleasing, and the performances by the actors showcase great pleasure in the juicy line deliveries they’re given. Richard Bremmer, with his comically arched and perpetually surprised eyebrows, as the institute’s in-house doctor (with some rather outdated views on women’s rights but with an impressive knowledge of Classical Greek) is by and away the film's MVP, injecting a sense of devilish absurdity into every scene he's in.

Unfortunately, much of the rest of the film comes across as the work of a highly skilled orchestra playing the dullest score you’ve ever heard. Perhaps a better director would tease out the themes in his screenplays more competently than Strickland, but here all we're left with is an impression of the technical quality that went into the film – costuming, sound design, performance. It’s highly stylised and begging for you to “notice” it, but the end result is lacking anything in the way of emotive effect. Everything is distanced and affected; it’s hard to care.

Strickland’s aesthetic sense is always worth keeping an eye out for, and it’s one reason why his short films are usually far better than his features (GUO4 and Cold Meridian are fine recent examples). Freed from the need to maintain a narrative over 90 minutes, he’s free to play with form as he sees fit. Stretched to feature length, though, there is forever an inevitable sense of disappointment to his work – delicious-looking, but hard to digest.

Flux Gourmet was screened as part of Berlinale Film Festival 2022. It is released in UK cinemas on 29 September.