As outlandish as the premise of Flux Gourmet may seem, it’s actually back to basics for writer-director Peter Strickland: recording the sound of food. Strickland first drew our attention in 2012 with Berberian Sound Studio, which concerned a quiet British sound recordist sent to Italy to work on a giallo film, where the wet recordings of beaten melons stood in for the sounds of mutilated human viscera. Three films later, it’s not foley work this time, but rather, the performance art of so-called “sonic caterers,” granted a residency at an institute to explore their particular peculiar craft. Either way, it’s sticking a microphone next to, and sometimes up inside, food.

Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie) is the director of this institute, an eccentric woman with wealth enough to fritter it away on an array of performance artists who have a fondness for exploring the noises of the culinary arts. That’s right, it’s not just the current group in residency – Elle (Fatma Mohamed), Lamina (Ariane Labed) and Billy (Asa Butterfield) – who dabble on this very specific canvas. Jan has had to reject the applications of countless other prospective sonic caterers, one of whom did not take the news very well and is periodically terrorising the institute. She did not like what they did with terrapins, and they want to make her life a living hell.

“A living hell” is an apt description for the life of the man tapped to document their vignettes, who has flatulence and acid reflex and other gastrointestinal complications that may foretell his demise. He’s Stones (Makis Papadimitriou), and he’s living with them during their residency, recording every demented imagining of Elle, the group’s leader. One typical example involves Elle stripping naked and caking her body in – watermelon? Rotten strawberries? The pulp of some fruit anyway. While writhing on the ground, she’ll hold the microphone up to her mouth and hit herself in the face, unleashing an unholy reverberation, which Billy manipulates even further with a device called a flanger.

It’s this flanger that provides the greatest conflict between Jan and the group. Elle refuses to take any direction from her patron, prizing her artistic autonomy above all else, while Jan reasonably argues that she’s financing Elle’s vision, so the least Elle can do is listen to some notes. Jan’s note is that the flanger, which distorts these sounds into an ear-splitting feedback loop, should be taken down a notch. While Elle proclaims she will reject the request on principle, Jan conjures a plan to get what she wants through other means, such as seducing Billy.

The narrative structure of Flux Gourmet is less a plot and more a progression of narrative threads. We witness a number of the group’s installations, as well as one recurring segment involving Jan, in which she directs them in a grocery store set piece where they have to pantomime her stage directions. Also progressing forward is the medical distress of our poor narrator, who has a number of comical interactions with the institute’s leering doctor, played by Richard Bremmer with a jack o’lantern grin.

Comedy is a more dominant element in Flux Gourmet than it has been in Strickland’s previous films, which are either horror or horror adjacent. While the senses of humour in Berberian Sound Studio and its follow-up, The Duke of Burgundy, were so dry as to be almost invisible, that element did come more to the forefront in Strickland’s 2019 film In Fabric, in which a possessed red dress gets up to some very bad deeds. While that was presented in as straight-faced a manner as possible given the subject matter, registering as intentionally comical but not outright farcical, it did undercut some of the ways Strickland was trying to unsettle us – clearly his primary ambition in all his films. The result was a film that never figured out what it wanted to be and suffered greatly for it.

Flux Gourmet finds itself in no such state of misfire, but we do have to acknowledge that its most disturbing parts are definitely compromised by the humour and satire. The aforementioned scene of Mohamed eschewing all vanity and punishing herself for her art, which contains an equally punishing sonic component, is Strickland at his absolute finest. This is a man as fascinated by the sounds he can create as the images, and this sequence, where the actress might as well be turned inside out to reveal her insides, is some kind of nightmarish hellscape with audio to match. Mohamed has appeared in each of Strickland’s films, and he couldn’t ask for a more determined collaborator, more ready to animate his vision.

By leading us down this primrose path to hell, Strickland can’t blame us for wanting to sustain that mood. Alas, he’s chosen for the first time to push his humour to explicit levels, focusing on absurdities like Stones trying to conceal his farts around the band, and Billy having a comedic fetish for nipple twisting. It’s not like the humour misses. It’s always worth a good chuckle, and what’s more, the satire is a non-judgmental sort. He may be having a little fun with this trio, but in a way they are his soulmates. If there were any money in it, he might also slather his body in food, record the sizzling of fat in a frying pan, then send the whole thing through a device that flings it back outward in a screaming explosion of reverb.

But Strickland only has the movies, and at this point, he’s still trying to settle on the shape of his own personal performance art. Strickland’s movies in general, and Flux Gourmet in particular, clearly mark him as a distinct sort of provocateur, whose work bears stylistic signatures that are uniquely his own. There’s the ethos of an alternate 1970s filmmaking in his work, and it’s easy to lose yourself inside his frames. The fact that he obviously has a sense of humour, but that it feels fundamentally at odds with his core aesthetic, is what’s keeping him merely very good, not yet great.

 

Flux Gourmet is currently playing in cinemas.