Gwendoline Christie and Asa Butterfield star in this stylish and deeply odd confection about ‘sonic cooking’
Peter Strickland is cinema’s elegant poet of fetish and rapture and oddity, creating movies that are like double-gatefold electro-pop concept albums full of deadpan not-exactly-comedy and strange mitteleuropaïsch pastiche. After his relatively conventional and heroically self-funded debut in 2009, the psychological drama Katalin Varga, Strickland moved into horror and eroticism – or, at any rate, into a world stylistically adjacent to scary or sexy, with his quasi-giallo homages: Berberian Sound Studio in 2012, with Toby Jones as the tormented sound engineer; The Duke of Burgundy in 2014, about BDSM; and In Fabric in 2018, about a haunted red dress. Now he has gone even further out on his slender limb with this pedantically bizarre creation – in which Peter Greenaway’s influence is making itself felt – occupying a precarious position in its own created world. Flux Gourmet is sometimes funny and always exotic, and every moment has his distinctive authorial signature. But I am starting to wonder if his style is becoming a hipster mannerism with less substance, and a less live-ammo sense of actual danger.
The setting is an English country house, which is a centre for research into “sonic cooking”. It hosts a regular prestigious residency for an up-and-coming auditory-cuisine collective: that is, a group of creative people who are into cooking as an experimental live event, combined with live Radiophonic Workshop-type sound creations, with – as it were – microphones shoved into butter and theremins set up near the consommé. Over a few days, the group is invited to workshop its food-sound ideas, discussing things with the centre’s various advisers, climaxing in a big showpiece event on the final night.
