Paul Thomas Anderson’s best film since Punch-Drunk Love is another cracked romance with a masochistic streak and a strong fairytale underpinning. Set in postwar London, amid the insular world of 50s haute couture, Phantom Thread is an oedipal gothic romance, a tale of lost mothers and broken spells, with secret messages (“never cursed”) sewn into its gorgeously cinematic cloth. A swooning score, crisp visuals and paper-cut-sharp performances combine to conjure a poisoned rose of a movie, inviting you to prick your finger on its thorns and succumb to its weird, dark magic.
Daniel Day-Lewis, in what the actor has claimed is his final performance, plays fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock, an artist with an obsessive streak, in the mould of Anton Walbrook’s Lermontov from The Red Shoes. Reynolds’s sister, Cyril (Lesley Manville), tends to his peculiarly picky needs – running the family business, facilitating his creative rituals and politely dismissing the disposable muses who have outstayed their welcome.
When Reynolds meets Alma (Vicky Krieps), a lowly serving maid, Cyril thinks she’s just the next in a long line of passing fancies, to be catalogued, dressed, then tossed aside. But is Alma actually a match for the Bluebeard-like Reynolds, the beauty who will break his beastly spell and perhaps stave off the inevitable fall of the House of Woodcock? As Reynolds tells his unexpected inspiration: “I feel as if I’ve been looking for you for a very long time.”
Tipping his hat in equal measure toward Hitchcock, Powell and Pressburger and the Brothers Grimm, Anderson swaps the heady, Stateside fug of Inherent Vice for a sharp Euro-vision as clear and pristine as alpine snow. Leading his own collaborative camera team (no director of photography is credited), the writer-director waltzes us through the doors, corridors and staircases of this strange land – from ivory towers to woodland retreats, where magic mushrooms lurk in the undergrowth, tempting and tasty.
Through this kingdom prowls Reynolds, as predatory as he is pernickety. With his insect-like limbs and ghoulishly handsome face, he has more than a touch of the vampire about him, a quality enhanced by a trembling vocal inflection that is part cloistered-Brit, part timeless-Transylvanian. Moreover, he’s hungry like the wolf (Alma calls him her “hungry boy”), displaying a voracious appetite when aroused. A scene of Reynolds appreciating a hearty breakfast recalls Michael Hordern in Whistle and I’ll Come to You, Jonathan Miller’s 1968 adaptation of MR James’s classic ghost story. And make no mistake, this is a ghost story too, replete with fevered apparitions of the departed returning to possess the living.
It’s also very funny, thanks in no small part to Manville’s withering delivery of zingers such as: “I don’t want to hear it because it hurts my ears.” If Reynolds is the eyes and mouth of this house, Cyril is its nose, sniffing Alma like fresh prey, smelling “sandalwood and rosewater, sherry and lemon juice” as she sizes up the new arrival.
As for the phantom thread of the title, the phrase apparently refers to the ghostly yarn that would haunt Victorian seamstresses, their exhausted fingers compulsively repeating sewing motions long after their work was done. But it could also invoke the lock of his mother’s hair that Reynolds has sewn into the canvas of his coat, keeping her always close to his heart. She taught him his trade and, aged just 16, he created a wedding dress for her. It’s a task Reynolds appears to have been repeating ever since – making dresses fit for his mother, waiting for someone to fill them and to take her place.
Pulsing through this celluloid swirl is a superb score by Jonny Greenwood which has earned him a long overdue Oscar nomination (he was deemed technically ineligible for his brilliant work on There Will Be Blood). From its looping, muted piano themes to lush orchestrations that recall a bygone age, the score is the golden thread that stitches the pieces of Anderson’s bewitching garment together. Gesturing toward Richard Addinsell’s music for David Lean’s The Passio nate Friends, alongside Rachmaninov-esque echoes of Brief Encounter, Greenwood’s work is note-perfect, capturing the delicate balance between creation and destruction that Anderson’s script maintains.
Plaudits, too, to costume designer Mark Bridges, production designer Mark Tildesley and editor Dylan Tichenor, whose craftsmanship helps bring this exotic vision to life. I’ve seen Phantom Thread three times now, and each time I have been gripped ever tighter in its sublimely eerie and immaculately constructed web.
