In Fabric
A surreal ghost story from Peter Strickland (Berberian Sound Studio, Katalin Varga) about a haunted dress that kills anyone who has the misfortune to wear it.
Set against the backdrop of a wintertime department store sales spree, this phantasmagoria concerns a cursed scarlet dress as it encounters unsuspecting customers and corrupts their lives. Obliquely split between two distinct tales in a dreamy divide reminiscent of David Lynch’s LOST HIGHWAY, Strickland’s film is populated with an idiosyncratic array of indelible characters and imagery. From a lonely divorcee to the wife of a washing machine repairman with a thousand-yard stare, dissatisfied souls float through a mesmerizing miasma of surreal sights and sounds, sporadically punctuated with bursts of disorienting collage-montage sequences. Pervading each thread is the witchy sales-matron of the demonic department store, who speaks to her clientele in a cryptic verse to mask her dark designs, and an eccentric pair of bureaucrats hilariously portrayed by cult-favourite actors Steve Oram and Julian Barratt. (source: www.tiff.net)