“I do wonder sometimes if you are perpetuating an archetype of epicurean toxicity with all this culinary hysteria,” muses Jan (Gwendoline Christie) to her latest group of artists in residence at the Sonic Catering Institute, the cultural institution Peter Strickland has concocted for his fifth feature. “I do not want to give the public the impression we are espousing any kind of dysfunctional alimentary ideology.”
Played by Christie with an appropriately delicious degree of hauteur, the directrix would undoubtedly be perturbed by Strickland’s willingness to espouse dysfunctions of just about every conceivable variety with . At once the director’s most perverse and most pointed and carefully controlled fea-ture to date, it firms up Strickland’s status as the most unabashedly Buñuelian filmmaker of his day—or at least the only one with the necessary
