1950s London: renowned dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) are at the center of British fashion, dressing royalty, movie stars, heiresses, socialites, debutantes and dames with the distinct style of The House of Woodcock. Women come and go through Woodcock’s life, providing the confirmed bachelor with inspiration and companionship, until he comes across a young, strong-willed woman, Alma (Vicky Krieps), who soon becomes a fixture in his life as his muse and lover. Once controlled and planned, he finds his carefully tailored life disrupted by love.
Every bit as transgressive as Punch-Drunk Love, Phantom Thread is a battle of the sexes comedy (and a black comedy at that) dressed up as a prestige picture.
The world of Reynolds Woodcock — its silky elegance, focused discipline and fetishistic attention to sartorial and ritualistic detail — is captured behind a scrim of nostalgia and romance by Anderson, who invites viewers to luxuriate in the creamy interiors of Woodcock’s townhouse and atelier, the dreamy mood heightened by Jonny Greenwood’s jazz-inflected musical score. Although Woodcock has disposed of his latest romantic liaison as Phantom Thread opens, his next conquest presents herself when he stops for a meal in the country and orders a ploughman’s breakfast from a bright-eyed waitress named Alma (Vicky Krieps). By the time he’s completed his compulsively specific order, the mutual seduction is complete, and the stylish, enigmatic, ultimately perversely playful game is afoot.
What ensues is a delicious slice of teatime gothic reminiscent of Rebecca and Suspicion, wherein love and sexual attraction become vectors for mistrust, battles of wills and power dialectics of Hegelian proportions.
Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
This is a profoundly, intensely, extravagantly personal film.
AO Scott, New York Times
This devilishly funny and luxuriantly sensuous film is so successful as entertainment that it’s hard to stop and notice the extreme degree of craft that went into its construction.
Dana Stevens, Slate
Paul Thomas Anderson
Daniel Day Lewis, Vicky Krieps, Lesley Manville
USA
2017
English
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Credits
Executive Producer
Chelsea Barnard, Peter Heslop, Adam Somner
Producer
Paul Thomas Anderson, Megan Ellison, Daniel Lupi, JoAnne Sellar
Screenwriter
Paul Thomas Anderson
Cinematography
Paul Thomas Anderson
Editor
Dylan Tichenor
Original Music
Jonny Greenwood
Production Design
Mark Tildesley
Also in This Series
Paul Thomas Anderson’s is a risky, unorthodox cinema, flexing between grand gestures and hidden depths, but to rewatch his films is always to discover that fleeting, elusive but profound possibility of connection.
Hard Eight
Anderson's debut is a deceptively modest character piece about a veteran gambler (Philip Baker Hall) who takes a much younger man under his wing and teaches him how to play the system and win. Until things take a darker turn...
Magnolia
This deeply personal 1999 California opus is ripe for rediscovery. Mapping the emotional traumas of half-a-dozen major characters as they criss-cross the San Fernando Valley in search of either recognition or reconciliation, it's PTA's riskiest gamble.
There Will Be Blood
Paul Thomas Anderson's lacerating epic about the birth of the oil age: Daniel Day-Lewis is extraordinary as the prospector entirely consumed with his own enterprise, a Trumpian figure of naked self-assertion; Paul Dano the evangelist who may be his nemesis.
Licorice Pizza
PTA's oddball courtship comedy takes us to the San Fernando Valley in 1973. 15-year-old aspiring actor Gary Valentine has the hots for 25 year-old Alana. She's bemused but admires his self confidence. It's quirky, meandering, but it sneaks up on you.
