Watch the weirdest thriller in years before it leaves Hulu

Recent history hasn’t produced many movies stranger or more specific than director Peter Strickland’s delightfully odd Flux Gourmet, released in 2022. It’s somewhere between a talky drama about the periphery of the art world, a thriller about creative rivalry, and a messy social horror movie about desperately needing to fart in socially unacceptable situations. This unlikely genre mashup alone would make Flux Gourmet worth a watch before it leaves Hulu on March 14. But what really makes the movie sing is how seamlessly all of these elements somehow work together to create something bizarrely hilarious. 

A writer named Stones works at an art institution that provides residencies for culinary collective artists — artists who use food and cooking to create transgressive performance art. Stones’ job is to cover the artists in residency there and document the ways they and their art evolve. This provides the movie with the perfect excuse for getting deep in the heads of a three-person band, the latest artists in residence, each with their own anxieties, origin stories, and artistic ambitions. 

The band members, who spend the entire film trying to think up a name, put on several strange food-based performances, all while struggling with their internal power dynamics, which are clearly causing them to break up in slow motion. Meanwhile, Stones documents every second of rehearsals, arguments, and strife, all while dealing with a mysterious stomach ailment that’s causing him heartburn and incessant, relentless farting.

If all of this sounds utterly ridiculous, that’s because it is. But the secret key to Flux Gourmet’s success is the fact that it treats all of this with preposterous sincerity. Everyone listens with rapt intensity while a character explains how a childhood memory of their mother’s book about table manners led to their dream of socially transgressive, food-based performance art, or how mixing the roar of a blender until it no longer sounds like a blender at all is the only thing they’ve dreamt of since they were a child. 

A lesser movie might flinch, giving Stones some element of journalistic remove from all the artistic snobbery. Instead, he’s just as enraptured with the performances as everyone else, desperate to find some avenue for self-expression — and gastrointestinal relief. 

The effect of all of this chaos and goofiness is twofold. First, it creates a wonderfully realized world within the film. By the time Flux Gourmet is over, Strickland has created an entirely fictitious artistic scene, full of petty jealousies, opinionated differences of technique, feckless pretenders desperate to fund something they can’t do, and inter-artist rivalries that escalate to the point of violence. The second, and perhaps even more important, effect is that it’s all extremely funny, in the most bizarre and specific way you can imagine. 

Every aching, awkward, ridiculous interaction between these characters feels equally performative and heartbreaking in a way that the movie invites you to laugh at without ever turning itself into an obvious comedy. Reminiscent of Yorgos Lanthimos’ stranger movies, like The Lobster or Kinds of Kindness, Flux Gourmet is a movie full of jokes without a single identifiable punchline. Instead it’s just a parade of silly characters torturing themselves by living life by a series of rules that they made up and no one else cares about — and what else can you do with that other than laugh?

Flux Gourmet is streaming on Hulu until March 14.