LFF 2018: In Fabric & Suspiria

In Fabric

dir. Peter Strickland, UK, 2018

Ground floor, perfumery, homicidal evening gowns, mannequins with pubic hair, masturbating boss. Going up! Peter Strickland's own brand of movie Marmite hits new heights of oddballery with his fourth and maddest feature, a freaky mash-up of Are You Being Served? and Tales Of The Unexpected, as directed by Mike Leigh after fourteen straight days without sleep. Personally I'm on board for every second of it, but I wasn't the least bit surprised to see a couple of walkouts at the press screening. Essentially a film about a killer dress that curses everyone who wears it, Strickland's film touches on the evils of consumerism and wonders what would happen if clothes treated us the way we treat clothes, to be discarded or recycled once tastes change. However, this is the sultan of modern British surrealism we're talking about, so the literal fashion victims of this phantom thread are the last things we're expected to care about.

Instead, In Fabric is all about its avant-garde form, whose influences stretch as far and wide as the light-hearted social realism of Leigh, the dark side of Roald Dahl and the Claret-splashing nonsense of giallo, all stuffed into a dangerously faulty washing machine and put through a spin cycle. The result is entirely unique, though, and it's a pleasure to be around while Peter Strickland's Loopy Laundry is open for business. Yes, much of it is absolutely bananas, but it makes perfect sense within the (admittedly blurred) boundaries of the film, and that's what counts. Challenging, surprisingly funny and never for a second predictable, this is where you come to see what cinema can really be.

Suspiria

dir. Luca Guadagnino, Italy, 2018

Luca Guadagnino's remake of Dario Argento's giallo standard is set in Berlin in 1977, so the first thing you expect to see is David Bowie sitting in the Dschungel, on Nürnberger Strasse, composing Heroes in his head. Sadly that doesn't come to pass, but we do get Tilda Swinton dressed as a man, which is pretty much the same thing. Swinton's not-quite-surprise turn as an octogenarian male makes sense in a film where about 98% of the actors are women, and the uncanny nature of his/her appearance - you can just about sense that something's not quite right - sets the tone for the weirdness to come.

Inserting subtext into the shallow schlock of the original, Suspiria '18 is a necessarily richer affair, taking in global power struggles and gender politics to bolster its undeniably daft core of witches seeking a sexy young Dakota Johnson type to assume the spirit of their chief crone. And while that's all very well, it does stretch out the first two hours to such an extent that when the inevitable last-act grand guignol sloshes in, it feels like a tonal shift too far. There's a terrific early scene of gruesome horror (if you ever thought Strictly was torture via the medium of dance, you ain't seen nothing yet) which suggests a new and genuinely creepy experience, but any tension is dissipated by the pacing, and that finale never horrifies as much as it should.