Somewhere far behind the window displays of Dentley & Soper's Trusted Department Store, a switchblade slices open a cardboard box. Strange things are afoot deep inside the uncanny Thames Valley on Thames shopping mecca that appears to be staffed by a coven of witches. The trappings and fixtures of the store seem familiar...except when they don’t. It looks like the late 1970s. Or maybe the 1980s. Possibly the 1990s? The southern England town of Peter Strickland’s In Fabric is exhilaratingly hard-to-place.
Shoppers are lured to the store by a hypnotic television commercial, just in time for the January Sales. Amongst them is Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), looking to get back into the dating game following the end of her marriage. Sheila is drawn to a malevolent "artery red" dress with a black flame motif. It’s a size 36, and yet it always fits the wearer perfectly, irrespective of their body shape. As the sales assistant Miss Luckmore informs her: “Dimensions and proportions transcend the prisms of our measurements”.
There’s an intoxicating, evocative tactility to Peter Strickland’s films. He’s an eclectic fetishist who revels in texture and sound. Strickland makes the kind of films that end with a credit for “Mannequin Pubic Hair”. The Nagra tape recorders and three-track magnetic film of Berberian Sound Studio are superseded by the pneumatic tubes and bakelite telephones of In Fabric, and the film’s musical accompaniment is the dark rhythmic pulse of Cavern of Anti-Matter.
Strickland also plays with the low-grade euphoria of ASMR, to both comedic and erotic effect, predominantly via the involuntarily seductive drone of washing machine engineer Reg Speaks (Leo Bill) as he explains incomprehensible technical faults in exhaustive detail.
Over time, Strickland’s films have gradually become more overtly funny, moving from the severe austerity of his debut feature Katalin Varga to the frisky The Duke of Burgundy. In Fabric is his funniest yet, but he never loses his grip or formal rigour over his vividly-realised worlds.
Berberian Sound Studio remains one of my favourite films of this century, so I was already primed to love In Fabric, and I loved it unreservedly. I absolutely cannot wait to immerse myself in this bewitching phantasmagoria again very, very soon. And I really need to get my hands on that Cavern of Anti-Matter soundtrack.
In Fabric is in cinemas and on demand in the UK from Friday 28th June 2019