Director: Peter Strickland
Writer: Peter Strickland
Stars: Sidse Babett Knudsen, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Julian Barratt
Run Time: 1 Hour, 58 Minutes
Link: https://amzn.to/2Y16q61
Synopsis
“You who wear me, will know me” — Label on the dress.
Dentley & Soper’s department store is having a sale. Sheila sees the ad on her tiny 80s-era TV. He ex-husband has found himself a new girlfriend, which gets her depressed. Even her son, Vince, is getting sex, but she’s going without. She starts answering newspaper classified personals ads (young people should look this up to see that it’s real) and starts thinking about dating again. She gets an answer to her ad and decides she needs a new dress; the old one has literally become moth-eaten.
She buys a long red dress from Dentley & Soper’s after the strange saleswoman there talks her into it. The odd woman is really excited by the dress and couldn’t be much more creepy if she tried. It’s all very mundane and boring, but the woman’s strange attitude shows us that this is, in fact, a horror movie.
That evening, the shop woman takes her wig off and now looks like a mannequin, even though she acts like a witch as she crawls into the dumb waiter. Sheila goes on her date, who is no prize. When Sheila gets home from her crappy date, she finds that she’s gotten a rash from the dress. After she goes to bed, she hears the dress making noises in the closet. In the morning, the dress is in the wrong closet. Back at the store, the shop lady comes back up the dumbwaiter.
Sheila puts the dress in the washer, and the washing machine literally shakes itself to death, taking most of the bathroom with it.
Sheila gets a lecture from her boss about her weak handshake, while the shop lady has sex with a mannequin while an old man watches. Sheila goes back to the shop for an adjustment and learns that the model from the catalog who wore that dress had been recently killed in an accident.
Sheila goes out on another date, this time wearing another dress, and the red dress crawls around the house all by itself. It tries to smother Vince’s girlfriend in her sleep. A dog attacks the dress as Sheila carries it home. The dog rips it to pieces, but later on, it looks fine. Sheila has a car accident and dies, caused by mannequins standing tin the road.
The dress ends up in a secondhand shop, where it’s bought as a gift for Reginald, a boring repairman, at his bachelor’s party. He gives it to the fiancee. The next morning, he has a rash and puts the dress in the washing machine. The machine blows up, but since he’s a repairman, he fixes it. He gets fired for doing it himself; the boss chews up and swallow’s Reginald’s ID card.
A few months later, the two are married, and he dreams that the new wife gives birth to a baby, born wearing the same dress. By coincidence, the wife goes back to the clothing store to try on a new dress, and the old dress causes a riot, a fire, and quite a few injuries and deaths there, including her. Meanwhile, Reginald suffocates when his furnace starts spewing out CO2.
As the shop lady rides the dumbwaiter down to Hell, she sees the various deceased former owners of the dress working on sewing new dresses…
Commentary
From the initial music and credits, this gave off an instant 1970s film vibe. Maybe even similar to a TV-movie from the 70s. Turns out the film actually does take place during that time period, so that part of the movie was really well done; it put me in the right frame of mind immediately.
Shiela and her issues were interesting and had a lot of dark humor, but when the story shifts to Reginald, you may as well turn this thing off. There are some funny bits here and there in the second half, but mostly, I didn’t like the shift to an entirely different story. It was abrupt and annoying, and part of the joke was the Reginald puts everyone to sleep when he starts talking, but honestly, his whole story did that for me. It’s almost as if they had two completely different directors for the first and second half. It’s like an anthology film almost, but not really.
The shop-woman’s accent was really hard to understand, and she had a strange way of speaking which only made it worse. I’m sure her words were relevant to the story, but I couldn’t make out half of it. I would recommend watching this one with subtitles turned on. I watch a lot of British stuff, but that woman was just something else.