In Fabric

Fashion designer Bill Blass once famously declared: “When in doubt, wear red.” In his latest Giallo filled hocus-pocus ecstasy Peter Strickland contradicts the statement by following the ways of a highly doubtful red dress. The film works like a dressmaker’s wet nightmare or a a surprisingly funny variation on Robert Bresson’s L’ARGENT. A haunted and beautiful red dress possesses dark powers and endangers the life of everybody who wears it. The film follows the dress instead of the characters. From a hilariously perverted and uncanny department store to a striking sound design and hypnotic musical score by Cavern of Anti-Matter everything within Strickland’s perception re-awakens the ghosts of 1970’s Italian horror cinema. It is one of those films one would love to own every single prop of, including a book called “How to flirt with older women” by fictional writer Dr. Roderick de Vranick, even knowing that at least one of those objects would bring death. Yet, while drifting more and more into a pastiche abstraction between lipstick, blood and fingernail eroticism the film also talks about human insecurities in neoliberal Great Britain and finds a strong anchor in its anti-capitalist doubt. (Patrick Holzapfel)

In the presence of Peter Strickland.