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Director
Peter Strickland
Year
2018
Country
UK
Runtime
118 min

Also released as

  • Το Στοιχειωμένο Ύφασμα
  • 霓裳鬼影
  • 夺命霓
  • Na Fábrica
  • Das blutrote Kleid
  • In Fabric: vistiendo la muerte

Filed under

In Fabric

A haunted red dress moves from customer to customer through a nightmarish department store.

A divorced bank worker buys a dress in a January sale from a shop staffed by uncanny assistants who speak in incantatory ad copy. The dress does not want to be owned.

Peter Strickland makes it as a giallo pastiche crossed with an advert, all Broadcast-style analogue synth, catalogue imagery and a mannequin the shop assistants attend to in ways best not described.

It is very funny and genuinely strange, structured as two loosely connected stories linked only by the garment, and the second half, following a washing-machine repairman, is even odder than the first.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste anchors the first half with real feeling, which stops the film becoming a pure exercise in style.

It is about consumption, both meanings, and the shop is the best horror location in recent British film.

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The same film, sold as a different film in each territory. Click any of them.

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