"In Fabric" (2018) Review
Yep, I’m finally back, and this movie dragged me back in.
You need to know something crucial about In Fabric right upfront if you want to have any chance of enjoying it. You need to know that it’s funny. Seriously, you need to know that at any moment you’re sitting there watching this film and wondering, “Does this movie know it’s insane and up its own ass?,” the answer is “Absolutely yes.”
Why do you need to know that? Because In Fabric is a movie about a killer dress, and it can feel like it’s taking itself far too seriously at times. Montage sequences of still images bookend random scenes. The music seems to be taken directly out of Italian Giallo films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Strange rituals take place inside the basement of a department store.
Director Peter Strickland seems to understand how strange it all is. The end of an almost Lynchian dream sequence will end on an absurd sight-gag punchline. A sexual ritual involving mannequins ends in a gross-out joke. Just as you think the movie’s lost sight of how campy and weird it is, something inevitably emerges from the shadows to sucker punch you with a joke.
The story starts something like a drama (minus the opening credits sequence), which concerns a divorcee named Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and her attempts to improve her stagnant life. She works an increasingly annoying job at a bank for two absolute weirdos, Stash (Julian Barratt) and Clive (Steve Oram). She has an incredibly annoying artist son Vince (Jaygann Ayeh) and his hyper-sexual girlfriend/total pain in the ass girlfriend Gwen (Gwendoline Christie). And as “divorcee” implies, she’s swinging single and decides to get back into romance through personal ads.
Once she gets a date, naturally, she needs to buy a new dress, which is where the enigmatic Miss Luckmore (Fatma Mohamed) comes in. Luckmore is a particularly strange clerk at a store called Dentley & Soper, speaking in strange phrases about retail, as if it was her religion. She manages to sell Sheila a red dress, and Sheila slowly realizes the dress just might be cursed.
Without getting into specifics, the film has something of an episodic structure at points, as the dress manages to migrate to new owners in an increasingly strange fashion. It’s a jarring thing to adjust to, but I managed to get past that.
Since this is one of those homages to 1970s film that’s lovingly made, the film looks absolutely gorgeous. Lush reds dominate the movie at every turn, and the retro production design makes it even prettier to look at. But the film’s sound design is where it truly lives, using tons of audio layers to put you off your axis constantly. On top of that sound design is an absolutely beautiful score by the group Caravan of Anti Matter. Not only does it properly portray its Giallo roots, it’s just as beautiful as the best Giallo scores out there. It is one of my favorite film scores of the year, and probably a solid 50% of why I dig this movie.
I know I haven’t talked much about the acting up to this point, but I’m not quite sure how to judge it in this film. Because the film is so stylistically strange, the acting is pretty campy and weird across the board. There aren’t many characters playing it straight, and while there are some prominent characters providing a counterbalance to the campiness, they are all but gone well before the end of the movie arrives.
That all being said, the one who makes the campiness work the best is easily Fatma Mohamed as Miss Luckmore. Her character is so strange, so funny, and so creepy all at once that she walks away with the movie. The other performers that really struck me were Julian Barratt and Steve Oram as the pair of bank employees. They feel like characters that have wandered out of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil into a Giallo film, and a scene involving them had me howling with laughter.
That’s probably the main reason I’m being so nice to this movie (this movie has no business being two hours long, probably the biggest flaw in its design, there’s definitely other issues to tackle as well), just because of how funny it is. Normally, these kinds of “style-over-substance” homages to the 70s feel like pure self-indulgence, but the jokes that break that tone up aren’t just total non-sequiturs, but actual gags with setups and payoffs.
But I will say this: Of all the movies I’ve ever reviewed, this is the one where I must emphasize:
YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY
Seriously, I can’t stress that enough. This is a deeply weird movie that definitely hit the spot for me. I like the lush color palettes of Giallo films. I like the weirdness of dark British humor. I’m a sucker for a truly excellent throwback film score. In Fabric was designed for weirdos like me, so unless you truly love weird shit, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this to you at all.
For more adventurous filmgoers though, have at it. I really had a great time watching this movie, and if you can deal with its more pretentious parts, dark humor payoffs are waiting for you…
And one last thing. Obviously, this blog hasn’t exactly been filled with film reviews recently. I’ve had an actual job for over a year now, and I really haven’t had time.
But now, I’m starting to make time, and hopefully, more reviews should be coming pretty soon. I have a shitload of movies I’ve seen this year that I want to talk about, and I can’t wait to share those as soon as they’re done.
