Fantastic Fest Review: In Fabric

A woman walks into a department store. Its employees are all dressed like they belong in an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, gliding around and spouting gibberish to their customers, trying to land a sale with their hypnotic language.

It works on the woman (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), and the leader of the gothic tribe (Fatma Mohamed) sells her a red dress so vibrant that its silk swishes and sways like a river of blood. It seems too good to be true; a petite size 36 when she is not, but surprisingly it fits every curve of her body, accenting her greatest features. This is the dress you’d murder for, and would want to be murdered in.

The latest gift to cinema from Peter Strickland (Berberian Sound Studio, The Duke of Burgundy) keeps in line with his giallo influences, breathing life into lush arthouse horror iconography that pays homage to kings like Dario Argento. Jean-Baptiste's Sheila is a recent divorcee who is longing for a new romance, one filled with sensual pleasures and companionship. Yet her new dress is cursed, of course, and leaves a mess of destroyed washing machines, erotic mannequin parts, and peculiar rashes in its path of destruction.

If In Fabric sounds completely bonkers, that’s because it is. It’s a B-movie laced in high art, and ultimately it is more comedy than horror. It’s a film that has characters who gush about “transaction[s] of ecstasy,” a satire about consumerist culture and how we thrust value onto inanimate products. With In Fabric, Strickland takes his viewers on a sexy, but deadly, journey into his bizarrely textured world.

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In Fabric

U.S. premiere
Thu., Sept. 27, 8pm.

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Fantastic Fest runs Sept. 20-27. For more news, reviews, and interviews, as well as our daily show with the oneofus.net podcast network, visit austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.