A cursed red dress makes life hell for whoever wears it in this eerie blend of tragicomic realism and consumerist satire
In Cornell Woolrich’s 1937 novella I’m Dangerous Tonight, a dress fashioned from the devil’s cloak drives its owners to commit terrible deeds. Filmed by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper in 1990, Woolrich’s story established a familiar pattern that can be found lurking in the shadowy seams of many a supernatural thriller.
The latest film to be cut from such fiendishly seductive cloth is In Fabric, a deliciously tactile romp from Peter Strickland, British writer-director of Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy. A heady mix of intoxicating nostalgia, clothing-related alchemy and horror-inflected twisted comedy, it’s an impressively uncategorisable affair, seemingly inspired by Strickland’s traumatic/ecstatic memories of being dragged to department stores as a child. Part consumerist satire (think a livelier version of George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead) part magical fairytale (Phantom Thread with added phantoms), it’s a film designed to provoke the tingling sensations of an “autonomous sensory meridian response” (Google it) that will leave you laughing, squirming, and scratching your head, often all at the same time.
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