General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

In Fabric

In Fabric is a 2018 British horror-comedy film written and directed by Peter Strickland, in which a cursed blood-red dress passes from wearer to wearer, bringing misfortune to each. It premiered in the Midnight Madness section of the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival and runs 118 minutes.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Peter Strickland, his fourth feature film¹^•²
Year and country	United Kingdom, 2018, 118 minutes, English¹
Premise	A cursed red dress sold at the Dentley & Soper department store passes from person to person with devastating consequences¹
Principal cast	Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hayley Squires, Julian Barratt, Steve Oram, Gwendoline Christie, Leo Bill, Fatma Mohamed, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Caroline Catz, Richard Bremmer³
Key crew	Cinematography Ari Wegner; music Cavern of Anti-Matter; editor Mátyás Fekete; production designer Paki Smith¹
Production	A Rook Films production developed with Blue Bear Film and Television, co-financed by the BFI Film Fund, BBC Films, and Head Gear Films¹
Festival premieres	Toronto International Film Festival 2018 (Midnight Madness, world premiere); Tribeca Film Festival 2019 (Critics' Week)¹

Spoilers

Plot and structure

The film is set during a busy winter sales period at Dentley & Soper's, a London department store whose staff behave oddly and whose merchandise carries a curse. Bank clerk and single mother Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), recently separated and re-entering the dating scene through lonely-hearts ads, is persuaded by the imperious saleswoman Miss Luckmoore (Fatma Mohamed) to buy a blood-red dress, listed in the catalog as "artery" colored. The garment fits every wearer as though made to measure, but it brings its owners rashes, fires, and worse.⁴^•⁵

The story then follows the dress to its next owners: Reg Speaks (Leo Bill), a washing-machine repairman with an unusually eloquent way of describing machine parts, and his fiancée Babs (Hayley Squires). The dress leaves burns on Sheila's skin, destroys washing machines, starts fires, and is implicated in animal attacks and car crashes as it moves among them.⁶^•⁷

Style and influences

Strickland modeled the film on the Italian giallo tradition, the horror-thrillers popularized in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, known for lurid color and jangling soundtracks, though his plot involves no black-gloved killer and no murder mystery.⁸^•⁷ Reviewers also heard the influence of 1970s European arthouse thrillers and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's chamber dramas.⁹^•³ The setting recalls the 1970s while deliberately feeling out of time.³

Sound and language. Strickland has described the film as "basically an extended ASMR video," referring to the tingling physical response some people have to certain sounds such as whispering. The dialogue is deliberately archaic and eccentric: Luckmoore tells Sheila that "the hesitation in your voice [is] soon to be an echo in the recesses of the spheres of retail," and invites her to "imagine: sixty percent vanished from this sensational garment."⁶^•¹⁰ The synth score is by Cavern of Anti-Matter.¹

Themes

Critics read the film as a satire of consumerism. The shoppers at Dentley & Soper, one analysis argues, consume mindlessly in the manner of the zombies of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978), trapped in an endless consumer cycle, and the store's ritualized sales patter represents the worship of the commodity as a strange rite from an alien world.¹⁰ Abbey Bender, writing in Sight and Sound, located the critique "right under the surface of the department store": wanting to buy one's way into a better-looking life is an urge so powerful it can kill.³ Strickland himself said he wanted to "find out what kind of a relationship people have with clothes," portraying the hypnosis of consumer society, and drew on memories of childhood trips to department stores, charity shops, and the unease of buying clothes once owned by the dead.⁵^•⁴^•⁶

Production and director

Peter Strickland, born in 1973 in Reading, England, made his first feature, Katalin Varga (2009), which won the Silver Bear for sound design at the Berlin International Film Festival. His next two films, Berberian Sound Studio (2012) and The Duke of Burgundy (2014), both played AFI FEST; In Fabric is his fourth feature.² The film was produced by Andy Starke for Rook Films, with Ari Wegner as director of photography and Paki Smith as production designer.¹ Strickland credited costume designer Jo Thompson for the wardrobe.¹¹

Release and reception

After its Toronto world premiere, the film screened at festivals including San Sebastian, Tribeca, and the Maryland Film Festival, and at Austin's Fantastic Fest, where Strickland won the Best Director award.¹^•¹²^•¹³ A24 distributed it in the United States.¹² Mark Kermode, reviewing for The Observer, called it an eerie blend of tragicomic realism and consumerist satire that rides a fine seam between humor and horror.⁴ On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes it held a 92 percent critics score, against a 6.1/10 IMDb user rating.¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Horror films (individual works) › Supernatural horror films › 2010s supernatural horror films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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