Carving out quite a niche in stylistic psychological horror thrills with Berberian Sound Studio, The Duke of Burgundy, and In Fabric, Peter Strickland returned earlier this year with Flux Gourmet, a culinary-focused oddity that premiered to a great response at Berlinale. Now set for a June release via IFC, the new U.S. trailer has arrived for the film starring Asa Butterfield, Gwendoline Christie, Ariane Labed, Fatma Mohamed, Makis Papadimitriou, Richard Bremmer, and Leo Bill.
Here’s the synopsis: “A sonic collective who can’t decide on a name takes up a residency at an institute devoted to culinary and alimentary performance. The members Elle di Elle, Billy Rubin and Lamina Propria are caught up in their own power struggles, only their dysfunctional dynamic is furthermore exacerbated when they have to answer to the institute’s head, Jan Stevens. With the various rivalries unfolding, Stones, the Institute’s ‘dossierge’ has to privately endure increasingly fraught stomach problems whilst documenting the collective’s activities. Upon hearing of Stones’s visits to the gastroenterologist, Dr Glock, Elle coerces him into her performances in a desperate bid for authenticity. The reluctant Stones puts up with the collective’s plans to use his condition for their art whilst Jan Stevens goes to war with Elle over creative differences.”
David Katz said in his review, “Flux Gourmet is arguably the first instance where Peter Strickland, the British genre specialist who’s always seemed inches away from a real career breakthrough, has had the storyline and structure—the real, solid content, basically—to make something as good as his posters and loglines promise. Making reference to promotional material is not superficial: more than anyone associated with arthouse horror (or “elevated horror,” to stir the pot) currently working, he is absolutely soaked, marinated in more disreputable sides of the genre: to be blunt, the softcore, Europhile, blood-soaked exploitation kind. Where the goal, some decades ago, was to just make you buy a ticket for the thing… so you could see all that.”
See the trailer below.
Flux Gourmet arrives on June 24 in theaters and on VOD.