With IN FABRIC, Peter Strickland is back with more great ideas but only so-so follow-through

Offhand I can't think of another current filmmaker whose movies combine exotic erotica and creepy behavior in any more memorable fashion than those Peter Strickland. His Berberian Sound Studio combined audio for a giallo movie with an all-out dissolution of character; The Duke of Burgundy offered S&M, butterflies and the very bizarre world of all women; and now IN FABRIC he gives us a sexy red dress that tortures and then murders its wearers, and perhaps the hottest and most perverse sex scene of the decade, involving a nude and prone mannequin. You aficionados are hooked already, right?

Fair enough, but be warned: You'll have to put up with Mr. Strickland's (the filmmaker is shown at left) predilection for very slow pacing and some tiresome repetition.

Here, in fact, he has the naughty dress pull a series of nasty stunts on its first victim (which turns out to actually be its second), and then he parades this same series all over again with victims number three and four. Please.

A genuinely sophisticated filmmaker would know better and do things a little differently. And yet Strickland sure can thrill us with his inclusion of gorgeous, outre sets; creepy ideas; and sexual stunts.

The "fashion" shop (above) in which much of the movie takes place is a wonder of glossy, gleaming 1930s and 1950s off-kilter glamor, complete with that old-fashioned and fun pneumatic tubing used in the department stores of yore.

Visually the movie is mostly a treat, as you'll have expected if your seen the filmmaker's other work. He also casts his leading characters well: Borgen's Sidse Babett Knudsen in Burgundy, Toby Jones (giving a terrific performance) in Berberian. Here, he uses Secrets and Lies' Marianne Jean- Baptiste (above), and she proves as watchable as ever as a newly single mom put upon by her employers, her shit-ass son (the very hot Jaygann Ayeh, below), his callow girlfriend, and now this homicidal dress.

Strickland's film makes yet another pass at indicting our increasingly dumbed-down consumer culture (Dawn of the Dead did it earlier and 2016's Nocturama one hell of a lot more stylishly), and has at least, in that dress idea, come up with an original-though-not-terribly-interesting "villain." He also does a little indicting of bankers and banks, via mom's sleazy/screwball employers, personified by (below, left and right respectively) Steve Oram and Julian Barratt.

The writer/director also casts his supporting roles well, and each is performed with the requisite relish. That's Gwendoline Christie, below, receiving some oral pleasure from her aforementioned hot boyfriend, as mom watches with, hmmmm, a combination of pleasure and envy (yes, another perverse and over-the-top sex scene).

The film's next round of victims, an about-to-be-married couple, are played with nice comic brio by Leo Bill (below, relentlessly fucking) and Hayley Squires (beneath and putting up with it). These two, who appear maybe halfway along, add some needed humor to the proceedings.

In a most interesting casting coup, the aforementioned Sidse Babbet Knudsen (below) appears in the film as the dress' initial victim, seen only via newspaper and catalog ads -- which leads TrustMovies to suspect that this noteworthy actress may have had a much larger role, one that might now be on what we used to call (pre-videocam films) the cutting room floor.

As it is, the film is already two (too-lengthy) hours long, and more, no matter how good Ms Knudsen might have been -- see Borgen to lean just how good she can be -- would have been a surfeit indeed. Overall, there is plenty here for film buffs to savor but not, I think, for more mainstream moviegoers, even those who claim to love comic horror films, which In Fabric pretty much/sort of is.

From A24, the movie opens this Friday, December 6, in limited release, in 25 venues -- from New York to Orlando, L.A., DC, and elsewhere across the country. (Shown above is the impressive actress Fatma Mohamed, who plays, perhaps quite literally, the saleslady from hell.)

Butterflies, S&M sex games, an all-female society and Borgen's Sidse Babett Knudsen highlight Peter Strickland's THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY

Not having been blown away (I was mildly impressed) with Peter Strickland's last film, Berberian Sound Studio, TrustMovies was at least more prepared for this auteur's newest ramble into the kind of bizarre visual world that can only be accessed via film. In its opening moments, THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY (the title refers to Hamearis lucina, a butterfly also known by this titular name) initially seems like a typically lovely European film: gorge-ous photography of a small country village, with babbling stream, plentiful greenery and charming architecture.

Ah, but what mysteries reside in this bucolic landscape! For one thing, there ain't no men. That's right: We're in a world of only women, no matter where we turn or go or look or lay our head, at work or at play -- it's all gals, all the time. Interestingly, nothing is made of this fact. It simply exists as a given.

Are we in an alternate universe in which men don't exist? Or this this some strange, fantasy dream? (The movie does indeed seem like a dream -- if not an outright nightmare -- from time to time.) Could this be meant as something psychological -- men's fears/fantasies of what women would get up to if given their rein/ reign? You'd have to ask these questions of writer/director Strick-land, pictured at right, and even then, the fellow might not be so forthcoming, for film-makers often prefer that you work a bit to ferret out meanings.

Meaning may not come so easily here, but I think you will have some fun and games just watching the goings-ons, which involve two attractive and sensual women, one of whom -- Sidse Babett Knudsen, at left, above, who played the lead in one of  the best television series ever made (Borgen, from Denmark) -- is worth seeing here in quite a different role.

The other woman, Chiara D'Anna, above, left, is younger, less tutored and more subservient. Or so it would seem. The Duke of Burgundy is also about role playing and shifting identities. Like a dream, the movie floats along, refusing to be pinned down. It is also, like a dream, quite repetitive, except that dreams, or so they tell us, take place very quickly. This one goes on for 104 minutes, which is good deal longer than its content -- however bizarre, sensual and transgressive it initially seems -- can handle.

Still, amidst the re-occurring sexual games there are a few upticks along the way, the chief among these being the visit to our pair by a woman (Eugenia Caruso, above) who specializes in what appears to be the procuring of some very odd sexual equipment for the bathroom. Along the way, you'll take stock of this relationship and realize that it is probably quite difficult to keep an S&M bond fresh and fun when one partner has an urgent need for masochism while the other isn't truly a sadist.

You may also imagine that you've wandered into a movie made by Radley Metzger, now working in tandem with Peter Greenaway -- not a particularly happy blend. Someone has called this film a melodrama, but it is hardly that. Or at least not a good melodrama -- which needs pace and plot and a little fire. After an initial viewing, The Duke of Burgundy seems all naughty titillation trying to approach sophisticated decadence.

Fun for awhile and certainly sometimes a visual treat, the movie -- from Sundance Selects/IFC Films -- opens this Friday, January 23, in New York City (at the IFC Center) and Los Angeles (at Landmark's NuArt), and simultaneously on VOD in most major markets.

The sound and the fury: Peter Strickland's smart, obvious BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO

The first thing you may notice about BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO, the new narrative movie about movie-making and personality dissolution by Peter Strickland (shown below), is that its opening credits are not for the movie, the title of which appears above, but for another film entirely -- a movie-within-the-movie called The Equestrian Vortex -- for which our protagonist, Gilderoy (great moniker!), who resides with his mother in England, has been hired to come to Italy to the titular studio and provide the sound effects for that film. This is rather fun, and different, and should give you a sense of what is to come: a movie of mis-, or more precisely, other-direction.

The time is the 1970s when the country and culture of Italy was known, not only for Fellini and Visconti, but also for Argento and giallo, the latter being those sleazy-but-fun slasher movies with which the Italians had gifted the world during that famous "me" decade. So here we are then, with Gilderoy (played by the unique Toby Jones, haloed in light at left, below) -- a quiet, rather repressed and genteel fellow with a mother complex (her letters to him and the importance these hold for him make up a certain portion of the film) -- as he works on the many sounds for the movie at hand. He also, literally from the first moment he arrives at the studio, is treated like shit, refused to be reimbursed for his travel expenses, and generally taken advantage of right, left and center.

Mr. Strickland's eye is fond of going, if not where we least expect it (of course we're going to see Gilderoy at work), where most other movie-makers absolutely would: to footage of the film that has been shot for which all these sound effects -- mostly screaming by some pretty young-to-middle-aged women, one of whom is shown below -- are needed. Can you think of another movie in which we never see, aside from that nicely-done and of-its-time credit sequence, one frame of the film at hand? Neither can I. Instead, we get a lot of footage showing us from where these "slashing" sounds emanate: vegetables and fruit (watermelon is the star of one fine sequence) being mutilated by knives and hatchets.

In another nice moment, Gilderoy shows us how to turn, aurally, a little light bulb into a UFO. All this is indeed fun, and Mr. Jones is, as always, a delight to watch. If you have never seen him do the best Capote turn ever (yes, yes: Hoffman is good and all, but Jones is better) in Infamous, then you have missed a simply wonderful, rich, original movie. So where does all this visual mis-direction and abuse of Gilderoy lead us? Into the dissolving of the poor fellow's personality. Which is interesting to view, for a time. But because it is clear, and very early on, that this is where we are headed, the movie has almost no surprise and finally not all that much interest.

Toward the finale, when the dissolution of character seems near complete, there is a marvelous sequence combining an English documentary with striking sound, artwork and editing that is a  visual and aural feast. And the performances by the Italians (if you've ever felt snubbed in a foreign country, these scenes will bring it all home) are wonderfully on-the-mark. Almost carried to the point of satire, they stop just short of that and leave you fuming for poor Gilderoy. (That's Cosimo Fusco, above, left, who plays the venal and nasty producer, and Tonia Sotiropoulou, below, left, as the lazy and nasty office assistant.)

Thinking about the movie now, in retrospect, Berberian Sound Studio seems more enjoyable than it did as I was watching. At 88 minutes, the movie began, around the halfway point, to bore, and I never recovered from that. Everything we have to learn from it, we pretty much already have by the midway point. What the film is doing in the IFC Midnight series (in which you'll usually find lots of blood and gore, as per the upcoming Maniac remake, for instance) is anybody's guess. Far too intelligent, precise and subtle for that audience, it'll bore 'em to distraction. This is an "art film," pure and (a little too) simple that gives away its hand a little too soon.

The movie opens this Friday, June 14, in New York City at the IFC Center and will get a midnight screening at the Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn on June 21. In the Los Angeles area, it also opens this Friday, June 14, at the Arena Cinema in Hollywood and the Downtown Independent in downtown L.A. If you're elsewhere, not to worry: There is always VOD, via which it will also open this Friday in most major markets. Consult your TV reception provider for specifics.