Where to watch: ‘Flux Gourmet’ is now playing at The Frida Cinema in Santa Anita and on-demand.

Director Peter Strickland likes to keep it weird. In his latest offering, Flux Gourmet, Strickland creates a devilishly obscure feast for both the eyes and ears. Keeping a comedic slow burn sizzling throughout its nearly 2-hour runtime, Flux Gourmet is singularly the most out-of-the-box, off the menu film I’ve seen this year.

Flux Gourmet tells the hilarious and horrifying story of one experimental culinary group’s month-long residency at a secluded institute devoted to culinary arts, called the “Sonic Catering Institute.” This isn’t your typical culinary arts: this is unlike anything that exists in the real world. But in Strickland’s world, culinary arts is a hybrid of performance art, experimental music, and live cooking demos. The sonic collective is made up of three artists: Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamed), Billy Rubin (Asa Butterfield), and Lamina Propria (Ariane Labed). They are given the opportunity to experiment with and perfect their craft, which consists of creating new sounds like hooking up microphones to blenders and running them through synthesizers.

Their progress is overseen by the institute’s head Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie), whose own insecurities with power dynamics leaks into the sonic collectives’ tense relationship with each other. As tensions bubble within the immediate group, the institute’s “dossierge,” a man named Stones (Makis Papadimitriou), very candidly admits to the audience in VO that he is struggling to disguise his flatulence. Wrought with gastrointestinal problems, he laments in a stoic tone that holding in his farts has become a social nightmare. “The flatulence was relentless,” he says in a hilariously poetic manner. “Why can one stomach be so free and another can’t?” But Stone’s internal pain sparks inspiration in one of the members of the collective, who convinces him to use his gas as an act in their culinary public performance.

Bold, bonkers, and savagely confident, Flux Gourment feels like familiar territory when compared to his previous films, including In Fabric and The Duke of Burgundy. In addition to its striking production design and ASMR tendencies, the real strength comes from its entire ensemble cast (imagine if the Knives Out cast was even kookier). Here, every actor does a fantastic job of toeing the line between untrustworthy and sympathetic.

If NTS internet radio collaborated with everyone’s favorite guilty pleasure “Master Chef,” the end result would be something very similar to Flux Gourmet. Satisfying in storyline and visual aesthetic, Flux Gourmet is quite a treat for the arthouse enthusiast.

1h 51m.