phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2019

In Fabric



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2018
Runtime: 1h 58min
Country: UK
Language: English, French
Genre Tags: Comedy, Fantasy, Horror
Plot Summary: In Fabric is a haunting ghost story set against the backdrop of a busy winter sales period in a department store and follows the life of a cursed dress as it passes from person to person, with devastating consequences.

Poster - Title Card


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Outside Reviews:

Simon Abrams
3.5 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

Watching “In Fabric,” the latest giallo-inspired adult fairy tale by British writer/director Peter Strickland (“The Duke of Burgundy,” “Berberian Sound Studios”), is often disorienting given how blunt its anti-consumerist symbolism and queasy sense of humor can be. But if you respond to Strickland’s weird combination of psychedelic elusiveness and kitchen sink melodrama, “In Fabric” might stick in your mind. Strickland frequently tests viewers’ patience, but his off-putting sensibility is powerful enough to make “In Fabric” as mesmerizing as its subject matter: salesmanship as a sinister, inescapable form of hypnosis.


Katie Rife
Grade: B - Say yes to the killer dress of the bizarre horror-comedy In Fabric

There are moments of artistic indulgence within In Fabric, to be sure—take the slo-mo closeup of semen arcing across the screen, or the flashback to the exact moment in Reg’s childhood that gave him a stockings fetish. But they’re all so bizarrely inspired that they’re oddly endearing, particularly if you’ve already got a taste for giallo-inspired strangeness. What’s less engaging is the suspicion that neither of these stories was substantial enough for a feature film on their own, and so they were combined to make a justifiable whole. The film’s demented satire of consumer culture and weird diversions into psychosexual nightmare fuel are less reliant on a coherent narrative arc, however, and Strickland’s unique ability to convey the sense of touch in an audio-visual medium isn’t dependent on story at all.