Bloody Mannequin Vaginas and Evil Babies: Inside the Most Gorgeously-Grotesque Movie of the Year
Peter Strickland is a genre fetishist with a dark, delirious sense of humor, and In Fabric is his most ecstatically demented fantasia to date. As demonstrated by his prior Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy, Strickland has a fondness for European horror and erotic cinema of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, and for his latest, he dives headfirst into Dario Argento-ish territory for the tale of a striking red dress whose allure is downright deadly.
The notion of a killer evening gown can’t be taken wholly seriously, and the greatness of In Fabric (in theaters Dec. 6) stems from its ability to revel in its conceit’s absurdity while simultaneously exploiting it for a sharp, unsettling examination of female desire, societal attitudes toward women, and the advertising-saturated capitalist environment in which we exist. It’s a phantasmagoric haute-couture critique of consumerism by way of a psychosexual head trip about human covetousness, insecurity and passion—replete with bloody mannequin vaginas, childlike drawings of areas where the sun don’t shine, and cataclysmic fires raging in tune with characters’ libidinous cravings and materialistic mania.
Like the bastard offspring of Mulholland Drive and Phantom Thread, Strickland’s storytelling is of a haunting, hypnotic variety. Rife with images of spiraling and circular objects and structures, spinning figures and camerawork, mirror reflections, and overlapping translucent portraits of men and women, In Fabric is an abyss of highly-charged motifs and symbols into which one tumbles. That descent into irrational terrain is similarly experienced by the first of the writer/director’s two nominal ’80s-era protagonists, Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a recently separated bank teller and mother to twentysomething Vince (Jaygann Ayeh). On the basis of surreal TV commercials, Sheila visits department store Dentley & Soper’s to check out their post-Christmas sale items. There, she spies a size-36 red dress that fits her like a glove and, pressed by the store’s lead saleswoman Miss Luckmoore (Fatma Mohamed)—who speaks in wackily florid language embellished by a strange accent—she reluctantly buys it.