Here is a comedy that doesn’t know it’s a comedy, a scary movie that doesn’t know it’s a scary movie, a pastiche that isn’t aware of any film other than itself. It is a deadpan-bizarre spectacle with stabs of electronic music on the soundtrack and could have been shot decades ago, forgotten, and then revived on the Talking Pictures TV channel.
Like director Peter Strickland’s previous movie The Duke of Burgundy (2014), it features thoroughly odd fetishistic fabrications, brand names and artefacts from an alternative commercial universe. I can imagine Rick Wakeman turning this film into a triple concept album or a character in a Jonathan Coe novel becoming obsessed with it.
In Fabric is about a haunted red dress, being sold in an unearthly department store in some unspecified period – apparently the early to mid 80s. Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Sheila, a recently divorced woman with a teenage son who is looking for something nice to wear on a date, and finds herself buying this dress from a strangely dressed and coiffeured Italian salesperson, Miss Luckmore (Fatma Mohamed) who speaks in peculiar orotundities. When Sheila seems uncertain, she purrs: “The hesitation in your voice seems to be an echo in the recesses of retail.”
When all the customers are gone for the day, Miss Luckmore indulges in erotic rituals with the mannequins and removes her hair, revealing herself to be fiercely bald, like Klaus Maria Brandauer in Mephisto. The red dress takes its terrible toll on its new owner, and Sheila isn’t its only wearer.
In Fabric is indulgent, certainly, and I regretted the fact that the excellent Jean-Baptiste is not as centrally important to the film as I had assumed she would be. When she is gone, the voltage drops a bit. But it is just so singular, utterly unlike anything else around.
