Sometimes you put on a horror movie to have an exciting time-get a little on edge, have a quick scare, have a laugh. Sometimes, you want to be enveloped in the richness of something just beyond understanding, and still have a laugh. This next film falls solidly into the second camp.
In Fabric (2018)
Peter Strickland’s hypnotic and delightfully weird outing is, on the surface, the simple story of a haunted dress, passing from one doomed wearer to the next, each meeting with a bad end. And it is that, but it is so much more peculiar and fascinating, so much more sumptuous and harder to ascribe a simple reading to. It is also mesmerizingly beautiful with stunning cinematography and a soundscape that both drapes the viewer in velvet and discordantly jars that same viewer out of any lasting sense of comfort, creating a succulent and disconcerting effect.
While the short summary above (it’s a dress—it kills people) may not sound like much, in actuality, there is a lot of storytelling to the film and its characters are given real space to breath. The film begins with Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a lonely single mother, whose nearly grown son is in a relationship with a much older, sexually dominant, frank, and domestically invasive woman (Game of Thrones’ Gwendoline Christie), shopping for a dress to wear on a ‘Lonely Hearts’ date from a newspaper listing (the film is set in the pre-internet-early 90s in an unnamed British town). She goes to ‘the sales’ (post-Christmas) at an upscale department store, Dentley and Soper’s, and is encouraged to treat herself to a slightly-showier-than-she-usually-wears, flattering red number by the lyrically cryptic saleslady, Miss Luckmore (Fatma Mohammed).
While she takes pleasure in her new garment, the date is a miserable failure. We are also witness to her many indignities at home, where she is disrespected by her son and his lover and taunted by their open sexuality, given her lonesome state, and at the bank where she works, where her managers nitpick the smallest details, such as the weakness of her handshake or the precise lengths of her bathroom breaks.
Many strange things start happening regarding the dress. Sheila gets an odd rash. While washing the dress with other clothes, the washing machine goes crazy and her hand is seriously wounded trying to deal with it. She is attacked by a dog while wearing it, tearing her leg open. Finally she tries returning the dress but is utterly rebuffed at the store. It seems that Miss Luckmore is both frightened to have the dress back on the premises and religiously offended at the notion of the holy act of a sale being profaned by its return. Sheila also discovers that hers is the only copy of her dress in existence, and that the model photographed in it for the shop catalogue had died. Before long, Sheila is startled by roadside mannequins while driving at night and dies in an accident.
The dress, having ended up at a thrift store (presumably along with the rest of Sheila’s clothing), is bought for Reg (Leo Bill) to wear on the night of his stag party. A soft spoken washing machine repairman, Reg is forced to don it by the unpleasantly bloke-ish guys he is obliged to celebrate his coming nuptials with, and somehow the apparel fits him just as well as it had Sheila. After an unpleasant and awkward night and a terrible hangover, the dress passes to his fiancé, Babs (Hayley Squires) and all hell slowly starts breaking loose.
The dress destroys their washing machine as well and after repairing it himself (out of step with his company’s policies), Reg loses the job that largely seemed to define him and is subjected to an oddly humiliating and almost sexualized loan interview by Sheila’s former managers at the bank as he seeks funds to make ends meet. The dress sabotages the water heater, filling his home with carbon monoxide as he’s enchanted by a Dentley and Soper’s ad on TV, before Babs hits the sales in the dress, where it seems to be responsible both for a fire that kills her and a riot that breaks out among other shoppers. Reg suffocates and Miss Luckmore seems to escape down a dumbwaiter with the top of her favorite mannequin, only to find herself in an afterlife sweatshop where all of the former owners of the accursed frock sit at sewing machines, weaving new red dresses of their own blood. There is a space waiting for her as well.
You know, just your typical horror flick.
There are so many interesting factors at play in this picture. Strickland has stated in interviews that he wanted to explore the relationship we have to clothes—what they do for us, how they make us feel, how we can change our sense of self, our identities with them. That is one feature. Also looming large, is a kind of satire of consumerism and work culture. But notably, I don’t think it’s exactly a critique—more, it pokes fun at something that we all, to some extent, take part in. The way we define ourselves with our labor, subsuming our personalities to the performance of jobs, the way we drink the Kool Aid of corporate jargon and workplace expectations, criticizing our colleagues for infractions that are otherwise meaningless, and then, in turn, how the money from that employment is purposed to further create identity with the products we purchase, the aspirational stores we shop in, the trying on of an elegant dress in a classy shop, having been upsold by an almost alien salesperson, so devoted she is to the grandeur and mystery of commerce.
Notable here is the empathy the film has for all of its characters. Often satire can have a kind of coldness. If a story directs the viewer or reader to examine the foibles of society, it necessarily puts on display characters who are foolish, if not downright evil. But Strickland paints each character with heart, while still leaving all of their faults on display. It is easy to sympathize with Sheila’s plight and her temporary happiness when she decides to be bold and, wearing the dress, present herself as beautiful, as a sexual being; it is lovely. For a moment, she is freed from her societally defined cage of middle-aged, de-sexed, single-motherhood. And it is also refreshing to have more than half the film focus on such a character. It seems rare that a Sheila really gets to lead a film, particularly one as glamorously odd as this one and Jean-Baptiste is excellent in the role.
Similarly, poor Reg is in a hard way. He seems like a man who has never really made a decision, but has just been pushed along by the current to find himself here. He and Babs have been together since high school and, while it seems there is little chemistry between them, marriage was just the next thing to do. But he is very, very good at his job. In laboring, he attains a kind of Zen state, perfectly balancing this part or hearing the way that part isn’t properly aligned. It makes sense that in the loan interview, the two managers get so turned on hearing him describe washing machine repair, given their reverence for the otherwise banal minutiae of their own vocation. At first, he is made uncomfortable and feels ashamed of being used as erotic fuel, but by the end, he gets into it and lives for a moment in description of his former work.
It is an interestingly fetishistic and erotic piece, though lacking in many explicit sexual encounters. Mannequins, stockings, washing machines, clothing—all become objects of steamy, tactile allure. The charge characters get from these objects, or from their participation in one side or the other of the exchange of capital, is heady and captivating, especially in concordance with the film’s rich palette, music (by Cavern of Anti-Matter), and an aural environment permeated with small noises and voices.
And, just as the film offers to swathe the viewer in this sensual allure, as well as putting forth moments of satirical hilarity, it still dwells in a menacing place, most evident in the inhuman, cult-like behavior of the employee-denizens of Dentley and Soper’s. At night, when the shoppers have been ordered to leave, uncanny rituals are carried out. Do they worship the items in their inventory? Do they control the dress, sacrificing their customers towards some nefarious end? Are they Alien? Demonic? Poetry made flesh?
There is definitely a non-narrative aspect, such that not everything is made to be read literally. Sometimes, the action rather serves as a kind of tone-poem, working in tandem with the other features of the film to achieve its nigh-hallucinatory effect. Fatma Mohammed does much of the heavy lifting here. While the dialogue and the staging intrigue, the way she sells Miss Luckmore’s devotions grounds every utterance and nuance, and elevates what could have been mere artiness, weird for the sake of being weird, into poetic truth.
Ultimately, Strickland has created an affecting piece, both pleasing and disquieting in which to sojourn. The comedy of its satire and the draw of its seduction work in equal measures, as does the obscure weight of its threat.