by Jason Adams
Dunno who's noticed but Twenty-Nineteen is making its last lap before it leaps, and so the time for taking stock of What Was is nigh now -- that is to say for the next several weeks of our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series I'm going to be looking back at my favorite female performances from horror films that I saw this past year. And what better way to start this project than with a film I saw at the start of the year when I reviewed it for Tribeca, one that's only now just being released, hitting screens on December 6th.
I speak of Peter Strickland's In Fabric, a bifurcated anthology-of-sorts that's strung together via one possessed red dress that ruins the lives of all those who come into contact with it...
The first half of the film follows freshly single mum Sheila (a fantastic Marianne Jean Baptiste) looking to move on with her life -- she heads down to the local high-class boutique emporium called Dentley and Soper's and there she meets, we all meet, the sales-woman Miss Luckmoore, an unforgettable amalgam of sophistication and grotesquerie played to the bewigged hilt by Fatma Mohamed.
Mohamed has been in all of Strickland's films, including Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy, but this is the first time he's let her steal an entire film and steal it she does. She steals the film not only visually, looking like the Grand High Witch in her totally immersive Goth Victorian Drag, but Strickland feeds her these gobbledegook lines of overripe retail speak, things like, "Dimensions and proportions transcend the prisms of our measurements," and "Did the transaction validate your paradigm of consumerism?"
And Mohamed pointedly delivers these lines as she's just learned our language phonetically, upping the sense of disconnect that the film revels in -- Miss Luckmoore feels at all times like a thing, dark as outer space, living inside of a person-suit. Not just horror but high comedy comes from the trance she and her fellow witchy salespeople have clearly put this place under -- they rhythmically outstretch their arms, as if clutching piles of scarves to their bosoms, drawing their clientele inward, but for those of us watching it's anything but inviting. It's bizarre and off-putting, the sort of thing you instinctively step back from.
And yet everyone in the film behaves backwards; they step forward. And somewhere in the recesses of our brains we regret to get it -- Mohamed is so hypnotic, so funny and alluring and so so strange, something in us too finds it impossible to turn away. When she's not there we want her there -- even more we feel her there, black eyes like two inverted suns staring down, an eclipse in silks and crinoline.
