Maybe it's unfair on the makers of the film to criticise it for not being what I was expecting, but In Fabric does set some expectations with how it is marketed and how the film starts. What I was expecting was some sort of Giallo-style headtrip of a film with supernatural elements, but with a backdrop of quirky 80s suburban England. A sort of Dario Argento meets Mike Leigh.
That's what I thought I was getting for the first 30 to 40 minutes of the film but then it seemed to lose its way. The atmosphere, the sympathetic but troubled protagonist played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, the strange and perverted department store in an eccentric Thames Valley Town - I was loving it and couldn't wait to see what happened next. Then it just failed to pay off, carried on going, carried on failing to pay off, then half-heartedly tried to become a compendium story and meandered off into nowhere. There was a belated attempt to give it a kind of shocking climax but by then all atmosphere and interest had gone out of the film.
I find that when I try to describe the film, it sounds a lot better than it actually turned out on screen. The idea of this film is something I really wanted to see but it didn't deliver on its promise. A lot of interesting and unsettling ideas are just thrown together without tying it together into something that maintains the viewer's interest. It didn't have to make sense, it didn't have to explain, it didn't have to do what I was expecting. But it should have been better and it ended up being very disappointing.
