In Fabric : Cuckoo Horror About Murderous Garment Upgolds Director Strickland’s Pedigree

By Thom Ernst

Rating: B

A few years back I took some heat for my part in securing a Best Film Award at Toronto’s ICFF (Italian Cultural Film Festival) for Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012).

The film was a creepy psychological horror film about a nebbish sound editor (Toby Jones) hired to add explicit squishy sound effects to the gory scenes of an Italian horror film. In retrospect, my fellow jurors and I might have been predisposed to embracing the film because of its stylish blend of art-house ambitions with creepy Giallo filmmaking. Until then, I had seen nothing like it and didn’t think I would see anything like it any time too soon. Then Strickland shows up with In Fabric.

Watching In Fabric is like coming home to Berberian Sound Studio, although this time the blend of art-house and horror is mixed with comedy and Gallio-inspired weirdness. It’s billed as a comedy-horror although the promise of that billing lays buried beneath a style that is ethereal and in humour that hinges on the bizarre.

In Fabric is a film about a killer red dress. It shouldn’t work but it does. Let’s be clear: we’re not talking killer as in va-va-va-voom, that dress is killer! but killer as in, it’s a dress that takes lives. It’s a film capitalizing on what could be cinema’s most extreme case of wardrobe malfunction. What’s more, Strickland doesn’t feel the need to provide an audience with any explicit reasons as to why the garment would have such a mean streak.

There is no back story where a crazed psychopath transfers his black soul onto a bolt of red fabric or a demented tailor sews together a dress using a needle dipped in a bloody vat of hate and evil. The dress simply exists seemingly without cause. Fair enough. If such a dress were to wind up in your closet, chances are, the hows and whys would be the least of your concerns.

Strickland divides his film into two parts; the first focuses on Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a woman eager to put her divorce behind her and return to the dating scene. Her dating efforts are both comical and disastrous. Her adult son, an aspiring artist still living at home, does little to mend her broken ego. Making matters worse is the son’s girlfriend who treats Sheila with shameful disregard.

Jean-Baptiste, who the very sight of sends images of Mike Leigh’s Secret and Lies (1996) rushing back to me, plays Sheila as a woman with formable strength going through an unexpected rough patch. That Sheila comes across a red dress that revives her sense of attractiveness is both encouraging and heartbreaking. It’s a staunch reminder of how vulnerable and fragile age makes us to the expectations of others. Sheila might have left the dress hanging on the rack were it not for the power-push sale of the stores’ witchy, Gloria Swanon-ish store manager (Fatma Mohamed) who instinctually hones on Sheila’s weaknesses.

The second part focuses on Reg (Leo Bill) a washing machine maintenance man (washing machines play a big part in the dress’s ritual hauntings) who buys the dress for his wife, Babs (Hayley Squires). Arguably, the second half of the film (Reg’s story) is the most inviting, though it could be argued that by this point, we have accumulated a better understanding of the intent and methods behind Strickland’s madness.

I watched In Fabric twice, a luxury, I understand that not everyone has, or wants. The first viewing allowed me to download the movie's plot, pacing and characterizations, whereas the second viewing opened me up to the movie's satire and humour. A lot of the film’s bizarre sense of jest occurs in the moments where Strickland’s Giallo film-styles are most prevalent: Knudsen’s goth-like sneers and exaggerated intensity.

The horror in the film can be as equally as subtle as the humour—it is easy to miss both. I suspect my admiration for this film will be met, by some, with similar reluctance as did the admiration I had for Berberian Sound Studio. But with In Fabric, the pressure is off because this time I’m not handing out any awards.

In Fabric. Directed by Peter Strickland. Starrig Marianne Jean-Baptiste,Fatma Mohamed, and Leo Bill. Opens at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox and in Edmonton December 6.