In Fabric review: It's Suspiria set in a department store

Peter Strickland’s strange, unnerving new film sees a cursed dress leave behind a trail of destruction

Dir: Peter Strickland. Starring: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hayley Squires, Leo Bill, Gwendoline Christie, and Fatma Mohamed. 15 cert, 119 mins

A cursed dress brings wrack and ruin to all who wear it. It’s a simple premise that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the strange, unnerving world of In Fabric, the new film from British filmmaker Peter Strickland. We’re treated here to a distorted vision of 1970s Britain, in a place called Thames Valley on Thames, where everything seems to cling to a fast-fading idea of luxury. You can feel the dust starting to settle on all the crystal chandeliers and silk pillows.

The film opens on Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), herself consumed by the sensation that she’s receding into the background. She dates men who are barely present; they stare dead-eyed at their menus like newly resurrected zombies. Her teenage son (Jaygann Ayeh) constantly shrugs her off with a “leave it out, mum”, while his girlfriend (Game of Thrones’s Gwendoline Christie) has a way of looking at her that seems like she’s staring right through her. Recently divorced, and having discovered her ex has already moved on, Sheila feels utterly devalued and desexualised, to the point she starts spying on her son’s girlfriend getting pleasured, watching them through the door’s keyhole. No, it doesn’t sound particularly healthy. But this is Strickland’s world, where sex and desire never have the possibility of being straightforward (his last film, 2014’s The Duke of Burgundy, tackled a BDSM relationship where the dom, ironically, feels domineered by her own sub).

The only place in all of Thames Valley on Thames that appears to have any spark of life is one of the local stores, Dentley & Soper’s, whose marketing policy involves hypnotising potential customers through a series of bizarre, nonsensical television ads. Its staff (one of them played by Fatma Mohamed, who’s appeared in all of Strickland’s films) wear high-collared, black Victorian dresses that make them look like schoolmistresses in an Edward Gorey illustration. They speak only in Lewis Carroll-esque riddles (“The hesitation in your voice, soon to be an echo in the recesses of spheres of retail”). Sheila falls for the enigma long enough to purchase a red dress, the most striking of the items on sale, but remains ignorant of what goes on behind closed doors. The staff’s ritualistic practises appear, in some way, to be controlling the dress and its intentions, leading Sheila down the path of unbridled terror. Think of it as Suspiria set in a department store.

Strickland, as a filmmaker, has always worn his influences on his sleeve, and In Fabric owes a huge amount to the work of Dario Argento and, more widely, Italian giallo movies. A term invented to describe the kind of horror-thrillers that were popularised by the country in the 1960s and 1970s, where black-gloved killers carve their way through a series of (always beautiful) victims, giallo films were memorable for their lurid colours and jangling soundtracks. Although In Fabric steps away from the genre itself, owing to its supernatural element, many of the same cues are still here. Most crucially, it’s the way the colour red burns with an almost unnatural intensity, whether it’s the dress itself, the pools of blood its path of destruction leaves behind, or the nail polish on a slender, well-manicured hand. Matyas Fekete also edits the film with a certain jauntiness, amplified by Cavern of Anti-Matter’s harpsichord-led score. It even indulges in bizarre, fetishistic flights of fancy, including a scene that involves a menstruating mannequin (it’d be impossible to explain further in a way that makes any sense).

The danger of Strickland’s work has always been that his reverence for our cinematic past might swallow his own vision. His 2012 film Berberian Sound Studio, a giallo film set during the production of a giallo film, perhaps came closest to this. Yet In Fabric feels like Strickland at his most free and playful, drawing as much from the British sense of humour – dry and morbid to a fault – as from Italian glamour. Julian Barratt and Steve Oram, for example, make a fine double act, playing Sheila’s painfully bureaucratic managers at work, while there’s a running joke about a repairman (Leo Bill) who has the ability to put people into a trance simply through the monotony of him describing washing machine parts.

In Fabric, inevitably, wants to be a sly critique of consumerism. The film is filled with images of dismembered mannequins and magazine models with their frozen smiles, all presented simply as body parts to be commodified and discarded. There’s not much said here that hasn’t been said a thousand times before, and the film is chopped into two sections that don’t quite harmoniously connect, but there’s such a thrill in the way Strickland creates this world that it doesn’t quite matter. It’s better just to sit back and allow yourself to be entranced.

In Fabric is released in UK cinemas on 28 June