We have watched a film by director Peter Strickland though I didn’t remember that until I went back to check. It was the Duke of Burgundy about a lesbian BDSM relationship. This one is completely different, being a horror film about, of all things, a dress. It’s a little too weird for me to really like but I have to admit that it is highly original and of course its visuals are simply sumptuous, just like the earlier film.

Sheila is a bank teller and single mother who wants to go back onto the dating scene after her divorce. She is also annoyed by her son Vince constantly having his girlfriend in the house. In a department store, a saleswoman who speaks in strangely archaic and florid prose sells her a beautiful, flowing red dress. She wears it to a date but the man turns out to be disappointing. The next day, she finds a strangely-shaped rash on her chest under the dress. When she puts the dress in to wash in her washing machine, the machine self-destructs spectacularly and injures her. She returns to the store where she bought the dress and is told that the dress is one of a kind and that the one shown in the store catalogue being worn by a model is the very same one she now owns and the model died shortly afterwards. Sheila grows increasingly frightened of the dress after a series of strange incidents, such as hearing noises when it is inside her wardrobe and finding it turning up in odd places. Indeed, when out of sight, it seems that the dress is both malevolent and animate, able to move and float in the air as needed to perform its evil deeds.

As this synopsis indicates, this is a deeply weird film, not just in having a haunted dress but also in that the world it takes places in is a strangely warped version of our own. At first, the differences seem minor, such as Vince’s sexual relationship with his intimidating girlfriend, or the unusual welcoming rituals practised in the department store selling the dress. But the weirdness just piles up. At work, Sheila is called in by two managers who lightly berates her for the most trivial of reasons and she just goes along with it. The department store airs commercials on television that seems to have a hypnotic effect on those who watch it. When the film switches gears to focus on a completely new set of characters, it just gets stranger and stranger. As my wife notes, this film seems to be consciously paying tribute to the work of David Lynch with recognizable shots that could have come out from one his films and even going so far as to include a character who resembles the director. Except that Lynch’s horror tends to be psychological and subtle while this film leaves no room whatsoever to doubt that the dress exerts a powerful and evil influence on everything around it.

I have to admit that the unusual structure and pervasive weirdness means that the horror remains effective throughout. It makes it clear that the focus is on the dress itself and it doesn’t really care about the characters at all, so the film doesn’t fall into the usual expected patterns of most horror films. It’s also interesting to experiment with the horror of a shop selling nefarious items and indeed the proprietor seems to have been patterned after the Slenderman character popularized on certain quarters of the Internet. Plus of course the film is beautifully shot and the dress itself looks positively decadent as its folds ripple and slither in the wind.

Overall I’d rate this as a highly original and effective horror film but as it doesn’t speak to me personally I wouldn’t count it among my favorites. I especially feel that the ending is clumsy and I’d like the background behind the dress to be developed a little more thoroughly than what is done here. In effect, I find that I’d like there to be more plot instead of just leaning on pure atmosphere and imagery.