Phantom Thread

Or: Man-Child-Eater

I was shocked, shocked I tell you, by how much I enjoy Phantom Thread. I am normally chill and sour when it comes to the work of Paul Thomas Anderson (beautiful camera work, distasteful subjects, weeeeeeird cuss’n dialog). But rather than splurging on an emotional porn-orgy, of a biblical western, or whatever the cuss the Master was, the British constraint of Phantom Thread.

Reynolds Woodcock, head of The House of Woodcock, a premier London fashion label is a man of particular taste. Played by the inimitable Daniel Day Lewis we see his childish delights, draconian strictures, and cutting dismissals with a weight and posh savagery that seems both enthrallingly theatrical and absolutely believable. Together with his sister Cyril (Leslie Manville) he creates some of the most enthralling clothes for English gentry and European Royalty, but can never quite find a proper outlet for his creative passage in a more … intimate setting. That is until he goes up to the country one morning and runs across Alma Elson (Vicky Krieps), a Luxembourgese waitress. In no time at all, she has become his muse, model, mistress, and employee. But there is no room in the House of Woodcock for Alma’s desires and needs, so she has to make room for them. Which she does. Brutally.

Anderson is an undeniable wizard with a lens. The camera perfectly frames itself through the interiors of the Woodcock working space, nosing in to watch the plunge and rise of a needle, filling our nostrils with the rank of butter, or the battlefield cacophony of breakfast (you have never heard a breakfast QUITE SO LOUD before.) It is helped along by John Greenwood’s beautiful score which, rather than conform itself to the action on the screen, impishly cavorts around it with a harmonious dissonance, like a reflection in the mirror that doesn’t quite follow its subject’s motions.

For all of Lewis’s talents (this is a role that fits him like no other, no grand gestures are required so he can pour himself into the minutia), the movie belongs definitively to Krieps. There is something so natural about her performance, in her first appearance she achieves a full face blush mid-scene, a rare feat accomplished only by a very few. When her first date with Reynolds takes a turn for the bizarre she adopts an expression of disconcertion that can only be described as the “Da Cuss?” look. And she keeps it up for half the movie as Alma is drawn into the further weirdness Reynold’s and his sister provides. But when she decides to act there is a deliciousness that comes out of her underhanded actions that enthrall and horrifies like the best of villainy. It’s a shame her naturalness subscribes to the mumble school of acting, giving us a kind of mouthwash dialog. Manville is an excellent foil to her, birdy and swanky all at once, directing the world the way it needs to go, “Let me be unambiguous.” Her battle of wills with Alma (noted in a rather silly scene where both women say goodbye to a visiting doctor simultaneously, like Cecily and Gwendolyn) is a little tired, but it’s thrilling to see how she can put her otherwise uncontrollable brother in his place. “Don’t pick a fight with me, Reynolds,” She remarks into her morning tea, “I’ll go right through you and then you’ll be all over the floor.”

There’s something about Phantom Thread that resists being called a love story. Love, or rather mutual need between two hearts, lies at its core, but there’s more the nature of a gothic-lite ghost story, of feminist epic, or downfall fable. It’s no more a love story than Pygmalion is, but possess both greater and, yet even less, ambiguity than Shaw could conjure with. It is sterlingly beautiful and deeply unsettling film, that for all its eccentric turns still always manages to resonate, like a teacup chiming a saucer in a house of quiet death.