The Horror of the Half-Off Rack
“In Fabric” is a film that asks the immortal question: what if a haunted dress had better acting chops than most of the human cast? Peter Strickland, the auteur of ornate absurdity, gives us a horror movie stitched together from nightmares, catalog copy, and the faint smell of mothballs. It’s a giallo pastiche that thinks it’s haute couture, but plays out more like a clearance sale of half-baked ideas—fancy presentation, strange mannequins, and a suspicious stain that looks like pretension.
The premise is simple enough to fit on a sale tag: a cursed red dress murders anyone foolish enough to wear it. What follows is two hours of visual fetishism and dialogue so elliptical it might have been written by a malfunctioning fashion magazine AI.
Blood, Polyester, and the British Work Week
Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Sheila, a weary bank teller whose life is as gray as the cubicle carpeting. She buys the titular dress from a department store that looks like a Victorian séance chamber run by the ghost of retail capitalism. The sales staff speak in cryptic riddles, as though possessed by the spirit of Vogue Italia. One minute they’re selling frocks, the next they’re describing your aura like they’re auditioning for Twin Peaks: The Runway Edition.
But the film’s horror isn’t supernatural—it’s bureaucratic. Every scene at Sheila’s office is a Kafkaesque hellscape of petty management and forms in triplicate. You half expect the cursed dress to show up just to speed things along. When it finally does, it causes rashes, hallucinations, and a general sense that maybe you should’ve just stayed home and watched Say Yes to the Dress.
A24’s Haunted Laundry Commercial
The problem with In Fabric isn’t that it’s weird. It’s that it’s deliberately weird, like a student film made by someone who found David Lynch DVDs on sale at Goodwill. The cinematography is sumptuous, the lighting seductive—but every frame screams, “Look, I’m art!” The end result is like watching a perfume ad that never ends, complete with long glances, cryptic dialogue, and a dress that floats around like a crimson jellyfish of doom.
By the halfway mark, Strickland ditches Sheila entirely and hands the dress to a new owner, a washing machine repairman whose monologues about spin cycles are somehow less tedious than the film’s pacing. His fiancée, played by Hayley Squires, inherits the dress and the curse, though by this point you may wish the dress would just strangle the film’s runtime instead.
The Curse of Endless Allegory
There’s symbolism everywhere—clothing as identity, consumerism as religion, mannequins as stand-ins for dead souls—but Strickland’s metaphors pile up like unsold stock. The department store doubles as a temple of fashion, complete with bleeding mannequins and masturbating managers. (Yes, you read that right. It’s as elegant as it sounds.) By the time the store burns down, it’s less a climactic finale than a mercy killing.
You can sense Strickland reaching for a grand thesis about the transactional nature of beauty and desire, but it’s buried under so many layers of cinematic dry-cleaning that it suffocates. The film mistakes opacity for depth; it’s less profound than it is exhausting.
“Suspiria” on a Budget, “Monty Python” by Accident
Critics hailed In Fabric as a loving homage to Italian giallo—those 1970s horror films full of color, sex, and baroque violence. And yes, there are splashes of Argento’s style here. But while Suspiria made us feel trapped inside a living painting, In Fabric makes us feel trapped inside a malfunctioning JCPenney commercial. Every scene lasts a few beats too long, as if Strickland couldn’t bear to stop admiring his own composition.
The film’s tone veers between comedy and horror with the grace of a drunk mannequin. You’re never sure if you’re meant to laugh or scream, and eventually you do both out of boredom. When a character explains a washing machine so thoroughly it induces hypnosis, it’s meant to be absurdist. Instead, it feels like an endurance test.
Haunted by Its Own Pretensions
To its credit, In Fabric is visually stunning. The red dress shimmers like sin itself, and the soundtrack hums with eerie menace. But the film’s surface beauty conceals a hollow core. Strickland’s obsession with mood and texture leaves no room for human connection. Every character feels like a prop designed to showcase another surreal vignette.
Even the dress, supposedly our villain, lacks personality. It floats, it kills, it occasionally catches fire—basically the same as a polyester blend left too close to a space heater. It’s hard to fear an outfit that looks like it escaped from Moulin Rougeand just wants a hug.
The Emperor’s New Dress
By the time the final credits roll, the only truly cursed thing is your attention span. The movie ends with yet another image of the red dress surviving the flames, pristine and untouched, like a metaphor for the indestructibility of bad ideas. Somewhere, Strickland is probably nodding sagely, convinced he’s made a statement about the eternal cycle of desire. The rest of us are just trying to remember why we didn’t turn it off after the first mannequin bled.
You can admire In Fabric as an aesthetic object—its colors, its sound design, its meticulously strange world—but as a story, it’s as empty as the store after closing time.
Final Verdict: A Fashion Disaster
In Fabric wants to be high art, but it’s really just haute nonsense—a cinematic thrift store where every item is overpriced irony. It’s the kind of movie critics love because it’s unreadable, and audiences hate because they can’t read it at all. Watching it feels like attending a gallery opening where everyone’s pretending to understand the installation that’s just a pile of laundry.
If Suspiria was a nightmare ballet, In Fabric is a dry-cleaning receipt that someone mistook for scripture. Stylish? Absolutely. Scary? Only if you’ve ever had to return something without a receipt.
Rating: 2 out of 5 cursed dresses.
