‘In Fabric’ Review: The Dress Is Possessed. But It Was on Sale. - The New York Times

The horror films directed by Mario Bava and Dario Argento in the 1960s and ’70s deliberately put coherent story lines on the back burner, the better to concentrate on shocking scares and uncomfortable atmospheres. The British director Peter Strickland is one of several current European filmmakers to embrace the mode of horror that Bava, Argento and some of their lesser-known contemporaries pioneered. His new picture, “In Fabric,” is his fourth feature and his most impressive, engrossing, imaginatively unchained work yet.

After an opening sequence in which a series of fake ads announce a season of sales at the fictional (thank God) department store Dentley & Soper’s, Marianne Jean-Baptiste appears as Sheila, a bank clerk looking for a fresh start. Her husband has left her, her tetchy adult son still lives with her and she’s tired of tedium. Dating through the classifieds (the film is ostensibly set in 1982), she’s looking for a hot dress, and she finds one, a red number, at D & S. She buys it despite the ultra-baroque sales pitch of a clerk, who’s dressed, like all her colleagues, as if she stepped out of a Velásquez rendition of a funeral.

The presence of Jean-Baptiste, an actor who brings an honest edge of realism to all her work, is an inspired bit of casting, but also a great piece of misdirection. If she makes you believe that this is going to be a less outré outing than Strickland’s 2014 “The Duke of Burgundy,” more fool you.

Like Dentley & Soper’s itself, the dress is bad news. It gives Sheila a rash and destroys her washing machine. It will do much more damage before the film concludes. “Don’t tell me you’re scared of a dress,” one character says. Right? Strickland risks ridiculousness with shots of the dress hovering, with menace, in a room at night. But the tableaus work.

As much as Strickland has learned from Bava and Argento, here he is more of England than of the Continent. In a relentlessly stylized fashion, the film insistently evokes the Britain of power failures and inflation and creepy public-service films.

The idea of “period” is filtered through imagination and fevered memory. “In Fabric” sometimes feels like a spontaneous cinematic outpouring from the esoteric record label Ghost Box, whose aesthetic applied hauntology to anti-nostalgia for postwar England. (Cavern of Anti-Matter, the electronic music group that scored this film, has in fact released one of its singles on that label.) The movie also has an absurdist bent. In scenes where an unctuous pair of bank managers interrogate an employee, and then, later, a loan applicant, it’s as if Eugène Ionesco were doing an adaptation of “Office Space” for an Amicus horror anthology.

But is the movie scary? Well, yes. The film spaces out several nasty and effective frights. And as its narrative seems to deliberately devolve into a dissociative dream, even the funny material hits with a choke in the throat. The general dread becomes overwhelming, a black shroud that perhaps can only be cleansed by fire. But let’s avoid spoilers …

In Fabric

Rated R for a cursed dress doing evil, icky things, and for extra-kinky department store employee meetings. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/movies/in-fabric-review.html

2019-12-05 12:00:00Z
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