MIFF Session 2: IN FABRIC

A divorcee re-enters the dating scene in a dress that kills. I'm not being figurative, the garment attacks people and you should see what it does to washing machines. Through a series of spoilable events it ends up in the possession of a washing machine repairman whose droning technical summaries send the people he's talking to into subsexual trances. The sales staff speak like vocal installation art. One says, when sensing a customer's reluctance: "The hesitation in your voice is soon to be an echo in the recesses of the sphere of retail."

Peter Strickland's new film is a clear progressive step on from the creepy world of Berberian Sound Studio and the severe one of The Duke of Burgundy. It's a progressive step because there's more and stranger. Just as we might think we have his M.O. down he gives us something else set in a familiar bed of absurdity and sensuality. Sometimes the dress's malevolence is funny but at other times, suspended in the dark above a sleeper, it's genuinely eerie. The coven-like sales women seem to animate the shop's mannequins (in one instance with functioning organs) but can also freeze into inanimate stupors themselves. Blended into this are many moments of perfectly credible workaday moments like the closeted meetings with the duo of middle managers and -- and far too much else. Oh, one thing I need to report is the ASMR aspect. The scenes in the boutique have an extraordinary sound mix or murmuring shoppers that is only just loud enough to be noticeable. At first I thought it was people in the audience.

After all that cramming the screen with big artsy worthiness, is there much else? Well, that's it but it's also one of the most thoroughly entertaining films I've seen for years. One thing Strickland never forgets is the spoonful of sugar. It's necessary. One aspect of this is the beautiful partially electronic score by Cavern of Antimatter which recalls Morricone's '70s thriller music. Another is the mix of performance styles from kitchen sink to stylised. And somehow it all works.

Strickland introduced the screening which began with a short film he had made as part of an anthology. Cobbler's Lot is an adaptation of a Hungarian folktale which, while not silent, has intertitled dialogue and a look somewhere between Powell and Pressburger's early technicolor and Guy Maddin's antique cinema that never was.

I also went along to an interview/Q&A session with him in which he managed to illuminate a few shadows. While the interviewer (an esteemed Melbourne cinema academic) often obstructed the flow of his responses, the questions from the audience seemed to animate him and his replies took on a lot more warmth and enthusiasm and without the audience members interrupting him his accounts of things like actor preparation and stylistic choices were at last lucid and rounded. A lovely appendix to what might well be my pick of the Fest.