Phantom Thread, the new film from There Will Be Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson, leaves such a singular impression that it invites all the familiar descriptions: it’s hauntingly beautiful, achingly lovely, a sumptuous feast for all the senses; it’s a tour de force, the best of the year; I’ve seen critics call it “sybaritic” more frequently than I would have imagined possible. As the closing credits began to roll at the screening I went to, a woman in the row in front of mine hurled one more adjective into the critical fray. Leaning over to her viewing companion, she said just audibly enough for everyone around to hear, “Well, that was pretty stupid.”
I can’t share that woman’s dissatisfaction, but I can admit that Phantom Thread is above all else a very strange film. It’s a movie-length case of déjà vu. You know you’ve seen something like it before, but none of the precedents that come to mind fit quite right. It’s a Gothic romance, except we’re about 100 years too far into the future—in the 1950s. It’s a serious adult drama, except the gravitas keeps getting undercut by the cast and filmmakers’ shared sense of sneaky humor.
Phantom Thread is disorienting from its very opening shot, which places us face to unfamiliar face with Vicky Krieps, a Luxembourgish actress you literally haven’t seen in anything else before. Seated in some firelit and unidentified drawing room, she’s explaining to somebody offscreen how “Reynolds has made my dreams come true.” A crescendoing piano cue—just one of many sophisticated original tracks that set the mood throughout the film—then transports us to the House of Woodcock, a fictitious couturier on the corner of a pristine London boulevard. A parade of middle-aged women in smart black jackets who look as though they’ve just gotten off of a night shift working their first job as protagonists in a Barbara Pym novel march out of their period-accurate automobiles and into the ivory white mansion where they will spend the film assiduously crafting the luxury skirts, gowns, and coats that spring from the mind of Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), the fastidious designer who lords over this most fashionable domain.
Reynolds runs the house with the same ironclad perfectionism he applies every morning to the stray hairs of his head and the loose stitches of his socks. His sister Cyril (Lesley Manville), an imperious and raven-like woman, perches always close beside him, quick with her pen to jot down measurements and quicker with her tongue to dole out savage criticism. The siblings inherited the business from their now-deceased mother, whose spirit looms large over the house and Reynolds’s imagination.
After our woozy introductory tour of the House of Woodcock, we watch Reynolds dismiss a lover who’s become too much of a distraction to his genius to keep around the house. Sensing that his creative equilibrium is out of whack, Cyril proposes that Reynolds take some time off in the country to replenish his mojo. Reynolds obliges, and thus the story is really set in motion. Over breakfast at some quaint seaside inn wallpapered in the robin’s-egg blue of dime-store romances and fond memories, his eye alights on a waitress named Alma (Krieps) as she trips over the carpet on her way to take his order. With a mischievous twinkle in his eye, he rattles off a litany of foodstuffs then snatches away her notepad to test her memory; with a mischievous smirk in hers, Alma gets it all right. He asks her to dinner; she doesn’t say no. Dinner turns into a dress-fitting turns into an invitation to come live with Reynolds back in London. Alma, who speaks with an accent that vaguely places her as an immigrant or refugee from war-torn continental Europe and who parries Reynolds’s every directive with an impish sense of humor, is up for the adventure.
The idea of yet another movie about a megalomaniacal creative genius tormenting a bright young ingénue is enough to give anyone an ulcer. Halfway through Phantom Thread, Alma catches on to the direction it looks like this movie is going in and takes the story into her own hands to avert disaster.
Phantom Thread keeps doing that: not being the movie you think it’s going to be. For a film released at this time of year—right as film critics are flooding the internet with top-10 lists and awards-adjudicating groups (seemingly always more in number each year than the last) are handing out nominations aplenty—this kind of unpredictability could be a death sentence. Daniel Day-Lewis, who announced last year that this will be his last role before retiring from acting, will be a draw nonetheless. But how will viewers respond to a film where not one but two women upstage the so-called greatest actor of his generation at every moment?
Krieps is an astonishing discovery, an actress who can look as bashful in one light as she can look self-assured in another. She disarms the self-seriousness of Day-Lewis’s performance with caustic frivolity, and while the movie eventually hinges on her ability to dance circles around whatever plans he has in store for her, the story is propelled by the vulnerability of her face as she is upset by, and then learns to adapt to, the mysterious man who has swept her off her feet.
Day-Lewis’s performance is impressive, but its seams are showing as his Method mannerisms mix with a good and uncharacteristically subdued delivery. Manville’s performance, meanwhile, cements itself into the pantheon of great supporting roles. She plays her part as though she were born to do nothing else. Cyril gets all of the movie’s best laughs, gets all its best cutaways, and does all the most ominous nonverbal communication. Somewhere just beneath the surface of her weathered face lives a vicious spirit who never fully gets to see the light of day. It’s a testament both to Manville’s self-restraint—and the filmmakers’—that the movie only hints at the full extent of Cyril’s devious capabilities but leaves it to our imaginations to fill in the blanks.
Speaking of restraint, it isn’t usual for Paul Thomas Anderson to show the kind that he does here. Obviously all the stops have been pulled out in the costume department, where Anderson’s longtime collaborator Mark Bridges has a field day building out a wardrobe that’s both gorgeous in its own right and richly symbolic in context (in one pivotal scene he dresses Alma in shades of green redolent of Kim Novak’s character in Vertigo, the ur-text for such movies about romantic and artistic obsession). Likewise the score, the fourth movie collaboration between Anderson and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood—after The Master, There Will Be Blood, and Inherent Vice—strikes a nerve that original film scores haven’t had the power to touch in maybe as many as 30 years.
When it comes to the story itself, the film’s merits are less obvious. Phantom Thread is perhaps most likely to run afoul of those viewers who, contrary to what all the hype would have them believe, were waiting for Anderson to pull out one of his typical go-for-broke storytelling maneuvers, like the volcanic and instantly memeable “I drink your milkshake” speech at the end of There Will Be Blood. Though the central romance between Alma and Reynolds goes into some unusual places, you could never accurately call Phantom Thread larger than life. The camerawork almost always settles for the sly, quiet gesture over the grand, otherworldly overture. Likewise, while the characters are real pieces of work, they’re still inhabitants of a recognizable world, one whose laws of attraction and repulsion turn human relationships into a tricky, though exciting, tango. In other words, it’s our world after all beneath all the clothes and all the money and all the twists and turns of the plot.
Some critics of Phantom Thread will probably counter that its characters are perilously unrelatable, too wrapped up in their own peculiar affairs to let us see any of ourselves in them. I don’t see how that’s a bad thing. After all, as one Pym heroine in Civil to Strangers once remarked, “Everyone should occasionally have his attention distracted from a too profound contemplation of his own self.” Phantom Thread is the rare movie where every last element is perfectly calibrated to help us forget ourselves. Even better, when all is said and done, it returns us to ourselves able to appreciate anew the beauty and ambiguity of our own lives.
Tim Markatos is a writer living in Washington, D.C.
