Flux Gourmet, 2022. dir. Peter Strickland.
This film was weird. Very weird.
I went into this film knowing nothing and having no prior expectations. The film follows a culinary collective in an institute devoted to culinary and alimentary performance and details their struggles with power dynamics and gastrointestinal disorders. The group makes music and performative art surrounding the theme of food. They make haunting music using the noises of food preparation and create horror-movie worthy visuals using food.
The plot felt frantic and like the film moved nowhere and instead just chased itself round in circles. The visuals of this film however, were some of the most beautiful visuals I have seen in film and I felt that they had so much potential.
As a horror film this could have been so deeply unsettling but the chaos and the humour took control in this battle between genres and moved the film away from where it could have comfortably sat. The plot, whilst chasing itself round in circles, seemed to swell in the end to a crescendo of chaos which had so much potential to be an incredible plot twist. But it found itself fizzling out into an underwhelming conclusion.
Visually beautiful, narratively lost.
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