Harefooted Halloween: In Fabric

What I Liked: The concept of a haunted dress is fantastic.  It’s so simple and you could do a lot with how the dress affects whoever wears it.  The flowy red design with sleeves is also genius because the thing can appear sort of ghostly like a body without legs, hands or a head.  It marks the wearer with a rash-like lesion on the skin and gets into their head where they start to see things.

All the performances are good including Sidse Babett Knudsen (Westworld TV show) as the creepy sales woman who sells the dress in question but Marianne Jean-Baptiste (The Cell) is the standout.  She’s a single mom working as a bank teller looking for a new love.  She’s a very relatable level headed normal person who gets thrown into a waking nightmare of a situation with a dress ruining her life.  Jean-Baptiste is so natural and likable in the role that you want to see her survive the wrath of the cursed garment.

What I Didn’t Like: Ok, the real big problem I have is the execution of the idea.  I want it to be a straight forward evil dress picture similar to Christine (killer car) or The Lift (killer elevator) but instead this takes a more abstract approach.  You know, stuff like the shop that sells the dress are run by weirdos/witches in black dresses who masturbate to their pubic hair laden mannequins and they can cause the dress to move through intense ritual and half way through the movie we switch to a new set of characters and one of those characters puts people in a trance whenever he talks in laundry machine repair jargon and what the fuck am I even watching anymore?  At first I thought there was a damn good film in here but it needed a serious re-edit.  Maybe eliminate most of the bizzarro shop stuff, smooth out the choppy editing during the more exciting scenes and get a soundtrack that fits better (I do kinda like the music but it doesn’t work that well with the visuals).  But then the story shifts to a completely different and much less interesting group of victims and a re-edit isn’t possible anymore.  So a re-write is what’s really needed.  And this is immensely frustrating because writer/director Peter Strickland (Bjork: Biophilia Live) came up with a bunch of great stuff that’s ultimately wasted.  For instance the dress brings bad luck to whoever wears it so someone might get attacked by a dog or get a cut on their arm or lose their job.  These incidents pile up turning the victim’s life into a living hell.  Also, the dress can’t be destroyed by conventional means.  So when it clearly gets torn or burnt it shows up later as if brand new from Satan’s sweatshop.  And you can’t wash it.  If you try it’ll shake the laundry machine to pieces.  Man, what fucking awesome ideas.  They’re only touched on briefly though compared to the rest of the runtime which is filled with awkward conversations not about the dress, the goings on of the mysterious folks who run the clothing store and other happenings like the victims’ dreams.

Overall Impressions: Damn this fucker’s unfocused.  There’s good shit in here but it’s buried under a mountain of artsy bewilderment.  A lot of this stuff comes across like weird for weird’s sake too like when one of the characters has been terminated and hands over his ID card his boss eats it.  Sure, whatever.

I would love to see this concept done down the middle because there’s a lot of potential.  This could be miles better than it is.