When Peter Strickland began work on his new film Flux Gourmet, he threw it all into the proverbial cooking pot. Food allergies. Experimental music. Performance art. Power games. All seasoned with a dash of 1970s Euro-arthouse. The result is a wild and weird dish served up by its British director who has already cultivated a reputation for edgy fare in films such as the Italian giallo-inspired Berberian Sound Studio (2012) and S&M-tinged The Duke Of Burgundy (2014).

Flux Gourmet is set around an artistic residency, with a culinary collective coming together to record music from the sounds of food. As the group falls out, the performances get increasingly risqué. ‘I’m interested in shock value, and I’m interested in the hypocrisies around shock value,’ Strickland explains. ‘The wrong things often seem shocking; and the things that you should be shocked by are not seen as shocking. And it’s led right into this.’

Documenting these artists is the shy Stones (Makis Papadimitriou) who suffers from a particularly unpleasant gastrointestinal problem. ‘There’s a frustration I felt with how food allergies are dealt with in film,’ Strickland says. ‘Someone getting anaphylactic shock in a film is played as comedy . . . I guess I wanted to make an alternative and look at it more seriously.’ He pauses. ‘I don’t want to present myself as the Florence Nightingale of film. But at the same time, you want to contribute something to that conversation.’

Still, as the artists come to exploit poor Stones for their work, it gets increasingly scatological. ‘I was shocked a little bit,’ says Fatma Mohamed, holding her head in her hands when I ask how it felt when she first read the script. A star of Flux Gourmet (she plays Elle, one of the extreme artists), the Romanian-born actress has been in every Strickland film since his 2009 debut Katalin Varga. ‘At the same time, I was thinking, “only with Peter can I afford to do this”. I trust him.’

To prepare for the role, Strickland sent her a wealth of material to absorb: still images, album covers, videos and films including 1963’s French crime yarn Judex, one of the movie’s myriad cinematic influences. She also listened to Strickland’s work in The Sonic Catering Band, a 1990s musical outfit who were very much the inspiration for this film’s culinary collective. ‘I think it’s an homage to his friends who were doing this experimental music,’ she says. ‘He showed me some pictures too: Peter with a chef’s hat on!’

Having proved herself highly capable with Strickland’s wonderfully florid dialogue (none more so than when she played the department store clerk in his 2018 horror-drama In Fabric), this time Mohamed took the opportunity to work with a dialogue coach. For two days, they collaborated on Zoom to help the actress get her tongue around his words. ‘It’s not easy,’ she chuckles, softly. ‘Peter is always challenging me so much in all areas of English!’

Every detail is thought out to the nth degree. Take the title. ‘It’s not used in the film, in the same way that Reservoir Dogs is never mentioned,’ notes Strickland. ‘The flux came from reflux, of course, but also flux is the art movement [Fluxus] with Yoko Ono. Titles are really important but I don’t always get them right. Berberian: I hate that title now, but I like Flux Gourmet. It has that feel. You just want it to relate to what you’re seeing. And it’s not really a gourmet film.’

While Flux Gourmet invokes films like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, Or The 120 Days Of Sodom (1975) and Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) in its more extreme moments, it hasn’t led to mass walkouts, says Mohamed. At the UK premiere at last month’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. ‘They were laughing a lot. I was so happy,’ she says. ‘You need a specific sense of humour, especially for this movie.’

Although it’s niche, Flux Gourmet does come with Game Of Thrones star Gwendoline Christie (who appeared in In Fabric) playing the group’s flamboyant patron Jan Stevens. Then there’s Asa Butterfield as Billy, the collective’s youngest member. Well known for his role in Netflix hit Sex Education, Butterfield was suggested by Strickland’s casting director. ‘He’s interesting,’ says the director. ‘I was after this Joe D’Alessandro feel from the Warhol days, this very low-key passive guy who everybody wants to have sex with. He really found that.’

When they shot (under covid conditions), everyone lived and worked together in a house outside York. When they weren’t shooting, they played croquet on the lawn, while Butterfield and Papadimitriou entertained the others with their guitars. Strickland faced external pressures (he had just 14 days to shoot) so having actors on set that he knew helped enormously. ‘Especially Fatma,’ he admits. ‘We’ve done every film together. So there was a shorthand definitely. She really pushed herself on this one.’

Certainly that’s the case in the finale when Mohamed’s Elle goes full-on in front of a live audience. ‘She’s someone who lives off shock value, and she became addicted by it,’ says Strickland of the character. ‘Once you get people gasping in an audience, it’s quite a thrill.’ In his eyes, though, he’s not interested in shocking for the sake of it. ‘To me, I get shocked very easily. Extreme violence shocks me. I don’t like it. My films are not that violent at all.’ Violent, no? But provocative? Most definitely.

Flux Gourmet is in cinemas from Friday 30 September.