Fashion fetish at its most fantastic, IN FABRIC is a freakish film of bespoke macabre- osity, a Lynchian labyrinthine ballad of a bad dress and bald primadonnas.

Like a Phantasm Phantom Thread, IN FABRIC is horror haute couture featuring a possessed dress, a fatal frock, and worlds coming apart at the seams.

Menstruating mannequins, sinister shop assistants and a washing machine repairman who can’t come clean are all stitched into this deliciously strange and totally mesmerising movie.

Writer director Peter Strickland weaves an intricate narrative that embodies two stories, one seamlessly threading into the other, so, in effect, you get two for the price of one. Three if you include the intricate back story of this haunting tale.

IN FABRIC is made of fear fibre, a ready to wear nightmare of subterranean dread and subconscious apprehensions and anxiety. Full of pleats and layers, it is a form fitting fright film that is funny, disturbing and unforgettable.

Central to the binary narrative is a department store of the damned, presided over by a perverted proprietor, a wet lipped, hollow eyed voyeuristic purveyor of unearthly penchant, played by Richard Bremmer, aided by his women’s apparel supervisor, Miss Luckmoore, a terrifically terrifying turn by Fatma Mohamed.

Shot in an evocation of the eerie by Australian cinematographer, Ari Wegner, IN FABRIC also boasts a bizarre production design by Kiwi Paki Smith.

See IN FABRIC for its visceral, visionary, vicarious wash of humour and horror for the first time, then view again for all its rich subtext about consumerism, advertising, sexism, body image, privacy, work place politics and bullying, and ethical and sustainable economies.

Most films get a release in cinema chains, IN FABRIC seems to have escaped, unchained, taking haunt in a single cinema. If you’re after something original, track it down, take possession.