In Fabric is a surreal horror film, featuring a red dress and a very strange department store.
It's directed by Peter Strickland and stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Secrets and Lies) and Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones).
Simon Morris: A number of my film-making, film-reviewing, or simply film-watching friends are big horror movie fans, though they prefer the term "genre pictures".
After all, "horror movies" carries too many suggestions of low-rent and low-brow - old-fashioned fright-fests starring Dracula, Freddy Krueger or Things from Black Lagoons.
But these days, the Genre Picture has gained some respectability, with award-nominated films like Hereditary, Get out, Don't breathe and A quiet place earning the title "elevated genre pictures".
Well, can an elevated horror film still do its job - scaring the pants off you - while offering highbrow, intellectual critic-bait? Come in, Peter Strickland and In Fabric.
In Fabric has earned kudos from the aficionados, mostly because it's downright peculiar.
Middle-aged Sheila goes to an old-fashioned department store where she's greeted by one of those slightly daunting Ladies In Black who used to intimidate the customers.
The fact that the attendant talks like a computer or an alien or something should have warned Sheila, even as she was bullied into buying a red dress.
But it soon becomes clear that this is no ordinary Red Dress. It is, in fact, A Red Dress from Hell! The sort of genre device that writer-director Peter Strickland assumes we'll immediately embrace.
Well, maybe. But of course, that's not the only reason that Strickland has selected this particular object, instead of, say, the army of the dead, or a big scary monster.
It's handy you can buy your horrifying antagonist in your local shopping centre.
But I digress. And it soon becomes clear that In Fabric is more interested in atmosphere than either plot, character or indeed traditional story-structure.
The film rejects the traditional three acts in favour of just two, possibly to cut costs. Sheila discovers her dress has certain side-effects.
That's Game of Thrones' Gwendoline Christie, presumably there to beef up the credits. She's on-screen for a total of about four minutes. That's about four times the amount given to Borgen star Sidse Babbett Knudsen.
They and a few other semi-recognisable faces drift in and out of what, for the sake of convenience, I'll call the "action" of In Fabric.
Once we've established this dress is no ordinary one, it starts causing problems for Sheila, her family, and everyone she knows.
But just as we think we know where In Fabric is coming from - an evil department store, run by aliens speaking English as a second language - and where it might be going to - nowhere good for anyone buying the dress - it shifts somewhere else.
Sorry, Sheila, you're out. Act Two features Babs and her tedious fiancé Reg.
There doesn't seem to be much non-dress-related connection between Babs and Sheila, but Reg did once do some repair work for Sheila's peculiar bosses. Does that count?
Reg… for us?
It can't be denied someone's having a good time on In Fabric, even if it's not me.
The camera and lighting crews manage to conjure up all sorts of weird angles. The enigmatic dialogue gets more and more Pinter-esque. There's strange music from the Cavern of Anti-Matter, and everything else you'd expect from of the Elevated and Incredibly Strange.
The allure of the traditional horror film is that you suspend disbelief and go into that dark place, fearfully looking over your shoulder, waiting for whatever it is - a ghoulie, a ghostie or a long-legged beastie - to leap out from under the stairs and get its teeth into you.
But fans of the elevated version don't seem to need it to make any sense. They clearly enjoy being bewildered as the blood starts spattering and the flames go higher.
Not my sort of thing, needless to say. But I don't even like department stores much. I must have been terrorised by one when I was a kid.
