In Fabric (Peter Strickland, 2018)

I feel a bit like Jason Bateman in that scene from Arrested Development when he opens the bag in the fridge labelled "DEAD DOVE - DO NOT EAT." I don't know what I expected. It's a haunted-dress movie, and as advertised, the dress kills various wearers, including a hapless milquetoast (Leo Bill) forced by his mates to put it on during his own stag party. (Some friends!) I guess I didn't necessarily expect that the dress in question would, you know, crawl around on its own volition, or would have sufficient supernatural mojo to destroy washing machines. But apparently that was supposed to be funny.

Also allegedly comic is the film's Eurotrash tone, familiar from Berberian Sound Studio, a movie I never bothered to finish. (The tone of Italian horror does nothing for me, so the pitch-perfect replication / parody of same strikes me as an exercise on par with an adult spending weeks on a Halloween costume.) The creepy department story is an interesting idea, allowing Strickland to reference Suspiria's creepy dance academy and Halloween 3's cursed Silver Shamrock commercials, and presumably gesture toward a soft critique of commodity fetishism and consumer capitalism. But it's all far too smug, too enamored of its own rococo absurdity, to come across as having anything genuine to say. Overall, In Fabric seems much more interested in humiliating, then punishing its main first-half protagonist (the wonderful Marianne Jean-Baptiste) for being a middle-aged woman with desires.

The sexy ASMR of the washing machine repair explanations was amusing, and in fact a whole movie about the passive-aggressive gay bankers Stash (Julian Barratt) and Clive (Steve Oram) would have been preferable, I think, but only in that sort of nodding-in-admiration sort of way with which I tend to confront Quentin Dupieux films. Like, I don't know why someone would be devoted enough to these ideas to make this, but you do you...