In Fabric (2018)

Director: Peter Strickland

Screenplay: Peter Strickland

Cast: Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Sheila; Hayley Squires as Babs; Leo Bill as Reg Speaks; Gwendoline Christie as Gwen; Julian Barratt as Stash; Steve Oram as Clive; Barry Adamson as Zach; Jaygann Ayeh as Vince; Richard Bremmer as Mr. Lundy; Terry Bird as Bananas Brian; Fatma Mohamed as Miss Luckmoore; Sidse Babett Knudsen as Jill; Fatma Mohamed as Miss Luckmoore

[Some Spoilers Throughout]

Peter Strickland returns, and I can confidently say, baring an interesting tangent to watch filming a Bjork concert, he's qualified as an auteur now. Thankfully he's the definition I feel an auteur should be - distinct style, obsessions, and most importantly a sense even if he was a working director more than someone with control over his work that any genre or type of film in his hands will still feel like his work, where every film I wait for is as distinct and worthy of dissection as the last. That said, even if arguably the same Strickland world of The Duke of Burgundy (2014), which was strange enough, he's somehow topped himself and made In Fabric weirder. It was apt I went to a subtitled cinema screening by accident as, not only did it help appreciate the nuisance of Fatma Mohamed's dialogue, as a female Nosferatu shop assistant, or the nuisances of washing machine maintenance technical speak, but it fit a film that can be best described as legitimately surreal already.

In Fabric is fascinating already as, presuming it was set in the past because of the fashion, the late sixties to mid-seventies in hauntology and nice cloth wear, the characters and their scenarios are of the modern day. Strickland is openly indebted to his influences - Euro horror and erotica between Jess Franco and Jean Rollin - but exactly as with Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, he isn't an imitator, instead taking these aesthetics and creating new art from them. In this case, the premise was of a cursed dress, but I couldn't help but have my own interpretation of the film being as much his satire about the modern day, between horror and comedy, of not only consumerism but even the malaise of neo-liberalism of morality and social behaviour turned into a series of banal, ever present spectres.

The dress, bold crimson red and likely vampiric, has multiple owners as, in a twist of the plotting structure, this film is actually of two halves. The first is with Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a divorced older woman, her son Vince (Jaygann Ayeh) a young adult dating a much older woman (Gwendoline Christie) with his own kinks, who buys the dress for a lonely hearts date. The dress is naturally alive and evil, but the story is as much her life and the dress store of origin. Sheila's own life though is also that of disconnect from her son and, in lieu to my theory, a bank job where (with Julian Barratt and Steve Oram as am ambiguous couple and her scene stealing managers) one is reprimanded just for taking too long for bathroom breaks and there is a leaflet for a proper hand shake. Even without the creepy clothing store with hypnotic ads and a tubing system rather than a cash machine, she lives in a strange and suffocating world of deadened existence, emphases by the second half introducing the characters of washing machine repair man Reg Speaks (Leo Bill) and his fiancée Babs (Hayley Squires), emphasising an empathy for these two working class characters as, with Sheila's tale being more serious horror and their's a pure kitchen sink farce, everything around them is just sinister and/or part of what is revealed to be a reality bending conspiracy.

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Comedy has been seeping further into Strickland's career from Berbarian Sound Studio (2012), his debut Katalin Varga (2009) (an art house take on a rape revenge film shot and set in Romania) the other anomaly in hindsight. I wasn't expected it, however, to be as pronounced as it is in In Fabric, probably emphasising the curious tangents somehow as well, despite being only a fifteen certificate in the UK, how far we can push explicit sexual references as long as you just hint the literal flying semen and not where it comes from, the aforementioned scene managing to be kinkier and weirder than more "extreme" films involving a fetish for mannequins. Legitimately funny, deadpan humour surfaces throughout the film, never compromising the legitimately haunting sequences, making curious bedfellows however made for each other.

Sex and the subterranean in desires is a huge part of the film in general, the entire story with an entire air of absolute strangeness that stands out even in Strickland's filmography. The difficult, strained relationship between Sheila and Vince's girlfriend Gwen; the whole quasi-gothic nature of the clothing store with bleeding (?!) mannequins; the intentional humour; even that Julian Barratt and Steve Oram have a rack of Edwardian period costumes just in their meeting room, meant to be there for them to encourage people to wear them with them (even for hand shake practice to make "it easier") for some obscure obsession. I nearly forgot to mention the dream sequences for this film, where Barratt and Oram's characters are obsessed with asking people about their dreams, leading to two, one more haunting, and the other involving a birthing that is batshit bizarre. 

Aesthetically as well, Strickland pushes himself further, as his first film actually set in Britain, openly embraces what has been called the "Hauntology" idea of cultural haunting of British seventies pop entertainment and culture but dragged into the modern day. Synth, very comfy and innocuous aesthetic styles, photos and images of the time period researched from archives (even those in Sheffield, the city I had to go to so I couldsee the film), as well as a score from Cavern of Anti-Matter who, considering among the instruments they used include "twigs" as well as obscure electronic equipment, is at times playful and others utterly alien to the 2010s and any other time period for that material. Between everyone working on the film and all you see as well, the film emphasises how British Peter Strickland is - in that, as we expected a horror tale about a dress, which he delivered, I found myself watching a film deliberately going off into tangents, becoming surreal, including locations like a charity shop or a stag party, which are very British idiosyncrasies, intermingling with the clear influences taken from European cinema and its lurid underbelly.

And it's unpredictable in the best ways, challenging in the sudden second act switch which undercuts the viewer's predictions or how, in the end, the climax is a massive riot in the clothes store rather than the slow burn supernatural story we were originally presented with. Thankfully as well this never undercuts its premise into something predictable, the red dress a diabolical entity never turned into a banal creation in a lot of boring horror, but something else as (according to the ending reveal) its shown to be a parasitic entity who devours and claims souls constantly, all with intentions of continuing. And it's a weird film. Very weird and for the better.

Abstract Spectrum: Abstract/Grotesque/Mindbender/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

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