In Fab­ric

Hav­ing set his pre­vi­ous fea­tures in Tran­syl­va­nia (Katal­in Var­ga, 2009), Italy (Berber­ian Sound Stu­dio, 2012) and a Mid­dle-Euro­pean Ama­zo­nia (The Duke of Bur­gundy, 2014), Peter Strick­land returns to his native Britain for In Fab­ric.

The loca­tion is the semi-fic­ti­tious ​‘Thames Val­ley On Thames’, stuck in what appears to be a per­ma­nent 1970s – or per­haps that is just Peter Strickland’s sly com­ment on the state of Eng­land, both Mid­dle and Lit­tle. On the periph­ery, there are coun­try walks and wood­land back­roads, but the town cen­tre fea­tures Vlas­sos’ Greek restau­rant, Waingel’s Bank, Staverton’s wash­ing machine repair and Zimzam’s night club – and dom­i­nat­ing everyone’s atten­tion, espe­cial­ly dur­ing this time of the win­ter sales, is Dent­ley & Soper’s depart­ment store.

At the film’s begin­ning and again near its end, a TV spot for Dent­ley & Soper’s is shown – not so much an ad as a lo-res mes­mer­ic invo­ca­tion, sum­mon­ing cus­tomers to spend. Old Mr Lundy (Richard Brem­mer) and his all-female staff, when they are not engaged in noc­tur­nal orgias­tic rites (with anatom­i­cal­ly respon­sive man­nequins) in the base­ment, run the store as a cult cen­tre, where ​‘the par­a­digm of retail’ is per­formed by zeal­ous cus­tomers as a rit­u­al act. The bank, the club, the restau­rant, the repair shop – these too are famil­iar yet defa­mil­iarised insti­tu­tions, man­aged accord­ing to strange, often per­verse codes and con­ven­tions that abstract and fetishise social norms.

The ele­va­tor (or ​‘dumb wait­er’) pitch for In Fab­ric goes: com­e­dy hor­ror in which a cursed red dress brings its own­ers to ruin. Real­ly, though, that only scratch­es the nar­ra­tive sur­face of a wil­ful­ly weird film that reduces Eng­lish mores to what a poster at Waingel’s Bank terms ​‘trans­ac­tion­eer­ing’: that awk­ward inter­face where­by indi­vid­u­als nego­ti­ate sales, rela­tion­ships, pow­er and gender.

Like the depart­ment store ad, Strickland’s film sends view­ers into a hyp­not­ic state with its rhythms and rep­e­ti­tions, whether it is ser­i­al scenes of mid­dle-aged divorcee Sheila (Mar­i­anne Jean-Bap­tiste) both on blind dates and in bizarre meet­ings with her boss­es (Julian Bar­ratt, Steve Oram) at the bank, or of young repair­man Reg Speaks (Leo Bill) putting him­self, his cus­tomers and even his fiancé́e Babs (Hay­ley Squires) into eroti­cised trances with his monot­o­ne descrip­tions of wash­ing machine parts, or just the pat­terns and leit­mo­tifs of Cav­ern Of Anti-Matter’s cir­cling score. Even the bipar­tite struc­ture hinges upon rep­e­ti­tion, as Reg and Babs’ sto­ry picks up where Sheila’s ends, retrac­ing its themes (with deviations).

You might fan­cy that Fat­ma Mohamed will be a ground­ing pres­ence, giv­en that she is the one actress to have starred in all of Strickland’s fea­tures – but in fact her sooth­ing depart­ment store assis­tant Miss Luck­moore serves as the witchy heart of the film’s chaot­ic con­fu­sion, using high­ly man­nered turns of phrase and sen­su­al ges­tures to cast a sur­re­al spell over every­one whom she seduces into mak­ing a purchase.

In this oneir­ic odd­i­ty, con­sumerism is every­thing, ulti­mate­ly devour­ing even the con­sumer – while the real hor­ror is the exploita­tive means of pro­duc­tion, care­ful­ly kept under­ground beyond the sight of bour­geois shop­pers above.