#11 - In Fabric (2019)
(dir. Peter Strickland)
This has been marketed as a movie about a "killer dress", which isn't entirely accurate - or at least, it's a gross oversimplification of the plot. Recent divorcee Sheila buys a red dress from a bizarre department store that seems to be having a perpetual "sale", but it seems to have some... unusual properties. I don't even really know how to accurately describe this movie - it's a bit of an homage to vintage euro-horror, a satire of consumerism and corporate workplaces, bizarre psycho-sexual thriller, and an extremely dry dark comedy. Oh, and there are a lot of scenes about washing machine repair.
There are some parts of this movie that I absolutely loved - it looks fantastic, the soundtrack is stellar, and it is genuinely very unique and original. It's funny but in a bizarre and absurd way, with the humor coming from the strangeness of the story and characters and not so much from actual jokes or gags. Marianne Jean-Baptiste is excellent in the lead role, and there are some other great performances as well.
I also found it pretty heavily flawed. It's much too long - this should've been a 85 to 90 minute film at most but it goes for nearly two hours, unnecessarily repeating a lot of the same material. At about the halfway mark it shifts focus to a new set of characters, and they are not nearly as interesting as Sheila is.
I appreciate that this movie doesn't shy away from being very weird and experimental, but it also could've been tightened up quite a bit and I found it kind of frustrating. If you liked Strickland's previous horror film Berberian Sound Studio, I think this is worth checking out, but personally I thought it was disappointing. Still, I give it a lot of credit for being like nothing else I've seen recently.
Comments
Post a Comment