Peter Strickland’s latest foray into the Italian horror and giallos of the past mixes absurdity, horror and uncomfortable atmosphere to grand effect. In Fabric announces itself in the opening images, as a close-up of a hand—not gloved!—slices open a box to spill the red contents inside. As the imagery morphs into still photographs of sales ads and classified ads, it quickly establishes a time period and a feeling, particularly as the score melds into a cacophony of laughter as it focuses on a particular classified ad.

The time is the non-distinct 80s. A time where lovelorn singles scoured wanted/classified ads in hopes of finding a human connection. One such love-seeker is recently divorced Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste). She lives with her young adult son Vince (Jaygann Ayeh), but it’s obviously a situation of convenience for him. He’d much rather, for example, eat at his father’s house, where his dad’s “new bird” makes delicious curry. Vince is an artiste and his recent artistic obsession is his overbearing and deadpan girlfriend Gwen (Gwendoline Christie), who is introduced, perched on Sheila’s counter in frozen still life repose, while Vince lovingly draws her.

Sheila has held onto the hopes of possibly getting back with her ex, but decides to finally reach out for new love through the Tinder-before-Tinder Classified Ads section of the paper. She sets up a date with a man named Adonis (Anthony Adjekum)…but first? She needs a new dress.

Luckily, the hypnotic ads of Dentley & Soper’s department store draw her in with ritualistic hand waves, beckoning her to partake in their glorious sales. At the department store, she meets a bizarre saleswoman named Miss Luckmoore (Fatma Mohamed) who speaks in rhymes and riddles like “Did the transaction validate your paradigm of consumerism?”

Sheila finds a beautiful red dress that’s also on sale, but the size doesn’t match. No matter, because as Miss Luckmoore says, “Dimensions and proportions transcend the prisms of our measurements.” Basically, the dress magically fits. It’s like a horror version of that pants movie.

So Sheila buys the magical dress. And while she goes on an ultimately disastrous date with Adonis—bent flowers, no chemistry; a transaction, at best—Miss Luckmoore dictates Sheila’s information into a red phone, takes off her wig and then crawls into a dumbwaiter that lowers her into the bowels of the department store.

Yes, this movie is odd.

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. After Sheila’s date, she discovers a circular rash on her breast—an opening salvo of the dress’s desire to maim and kill. As Sheila gets more embroiled in the dress’s affliction, it lashes out with the same deadpan precision as Gwendoline Christie’s line delivery. Strickland’s script skirts the thin line between being a fiercely funny and caustic comedy, a horrifying story of commercialism gone ritualistically amuck and an erotic giallo whose color scheme would make Dario Argento climax.

Too far? Well, In Fabric is a film where Miss Luckmoore drags a naked and fully articulated female mannequin into a witchy ritual. She sits on the mannequin’s face, reaches down into its fully realistic and bleeding vagina and licks the blood off her fingers while a man masturbates furiously. Talking about Dario’s sexual gratification is old hat by this point.

In Fabric is an oddity of a film that feels like a pastiche in the same way some could say Knife + Heart was. But, like that film, it’s a singular vision that transcends the label and can stand on its own. Strickland is an absurdist auteur who equally confounded and dazzled in movies like Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy and In Fabric feels like a natural progression of his idiosyncratic style.

The midpoint of the film is where Strickland’s narrative gambit lost me a bit and is probably the reason the film circulated through the festival circuits for awhile, instead of getting a grand theatrical release like other A24 movies. About an hour and change into the story, Strickland switches perspectives to a completely different character with no real relation to our, at this point, beloved Sheila…except that he, too, tangles with the red dress.

In this way, the story kind of brings to mind The Red Violin and its focus on another lovingly crafted and cursed item of obsession. Unlike that film, which follows the violin’s cursed progression through the ages, In Fabric only tells two stories. And it’s here that the film doesn’t completely work for me because the amount of time we spend with Sheila doesn’t fit into an anthological structure. Strickland’s film is at its best when its focuses on Sheila’s obstacles of love and fabric and it’s a bit jarring when the narrative completely stops and has to introduce a new set of characters.

The two parts do fit thematically together and the narrative makes good use of the dual perspectives, particularly as it keeps referencing a pair of bank managers who are constantly interrogating people as if they are The Bobs. But it feels so tantalizingly close to a perfect atmospheric film that either needed to have more, quicker segments or only focus on Sheila’s story.

Still, fans of Strickland’s work will continue to find a lot to love here.