Phan­tom Thread

Peel back the exquis­ite­ly lac­quered lay­ers of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 puz­zle movie, The Mas­ter, and you’ll find a fun­ny thing. It’s less inter­est­ing as an exposé on the inner work­ings of Sci­en­tol­ogy, but fas­ci­nat­ing as a study of the gid­dy brinks­man­ship between two very dif­fer­ent men. Though it care­ful­ly eludes a finite read­ing, the film talks about the dif­fi­cul­ties of build­ing and main­tain­ing an insti­tu­tion by observ­ing the bom­bas­tic emo­tion­al con­tor­tions with­in a sin­gle, high­ly com­bustible relationship.

In his new film Phan­tom Thread, Ander­son is at it again, but this time he’s shift­ed the camp from his Cal­i­for­nia com­fort zone to a sparse­ly deco­rous, light­ly goth­ic Lon­don and its leafy envi­rons dur­ing the 1950s. His spe­cif­ic focus is a pres­tige cou­ture house man­aged by reedy-voiced dress­mak­er (by roy­al appoint­ment), Reynolds Wood­cock (Daniel Day-Lewis).

The fair­er sex are, for the mae­stro Reynolds, lit­tle more than bewitch­ing chat­tel. They are man­nequins to be mould­ed, shift­ed and dis­posed of as is his want. All except for his moth­er, who was and will always be close to his heart. His mind is rigid­ly com­part­men­talised, like a fine antique chest of draw­ers, dis­al­low­ing sus­tained roman­tic love when the urgent busi­ness of artis­tic cre­ation beckons.

Desire, for him, absolute­ly can­not be a con­stant – it fades in and out, often appear­ing as a care-blan­ket of relief which fits around his pun­ish­ing work sched­ule. Order, too, is para­mount when it comes to press­ing on through the day. He inhales iron­ware ket­tles full of Lap­sang sou­chong at break­fast, but woe betide any­one who serves it to him unasked for. He is fas­tid­i­ous to a near-psy­chot­ic degree, but can­not com­pre­hend why oth­ers might decode his cat­ty refine­ment as mania.

His sis­ter Cyril (Les­ley Manville) is his man­ag­er, con­fi­dante and hench­woman. She is a ter­ri­fy­ing back room oper­a­tor who choos­es her words with ven­omous pre­ci­sion. As the first order of busi­ness, she posts Reynolds off to his sea­side bolt­hole while sev­er­ing ties with his most recent plaything.

Far from lux­u­ri­at­ing in his new­found inde­pen­dence, Reynolds lit­er­al­ly falls for the first woman he sees – a sim­ple, sweet­ly pret­ty Mit­tel-Euro­pean hotel wait­ress named Alma (Vicky Krieps). His mas­ter­ful chat-up tech­nique involves hav­ing her mem­o­rise one of cinema’s most gar­gan­tu­an fry-up orders. (The man­ner in which Day-Lewis intones the word ​“Welsh Rarebit”, where he some­how gives hard empha­sis to every let­ter, is one of the film’s sim­pler plea­sures. He does a sim­i­lar thing lat­er with the word ​“cream”. And ​“sausages”.)

And so the pair float off into the wispy Eng­lish clouds, their hair-trig­ger enchant­ment buoyed by Jon­ny Greenwood’s rhap­sod­ic score, which com­bines the dain­ty strains of 19^th cen­tu­ry cham­ber music with the melod­ic com­fort of British light clas­si­cal. There is music hum­ming in the back­ground of near­ly every scene, though Ander­son nev­er uses it to enhance or sculpt emo­tion, but as a con­stant reminder that this is a movie – a dain­ty, gor­geous fab­ri­ca­tion of real life.

From this moment on, the film is about Reynolds and Alma. The phan­tom thread of the title could refer to the imper­cep­ti­ble and incom­pre­hen­si­ble tie that binds them. Nei­ther seem to know why they have cho­sen to remain locked in the other’s orbit, par­tic­u­lar­ly as the dark times appear to out­weigh the light by an uncom­fort­able mar­gin. As with The Mas­ter, the film plays like an obscure psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic case study, and Ander­son forces you to exca­vate (like Day-Lewis at the begin­ning of There Will Be Blood) for meaning.

Alma the dilet­tante, with her Ger­man­ic accent and puffy pink cheeks, arrives from nowhere, lack­ing either a back sto­ry or a sense of future aspi­ra­tion. Both char­ac­ters are divorced from his­to­ry – the script pays scant heed to time-sen­si­tive ref­er­ences or the tit­tle-tat­tle news sto­ries of the day. They, too, stray the path from tra­di­tion­al gen­der norms, him with his effete man­ner buf­fet­ing against her deep, monot­o­ne drawl and defined boy­ish fea­tures. And what does Cyril know while all this is hap­pen­ing? Why does she kow­tow to the will of her dom­i­neer­ing broth­er? The con­stant, nag­ging ques­tion of why this is all hap­pen­ing hangs over the film. It tor­ments like a silent spec­tre cow­er­ing in the cor­ner of a bedroom.

Though this is very much a PTA orig­i­nal in the way it play­ful­ly fudges the line between fas­tid­i­ous­ness and spon­tane­ity, the film it recalls the most is 1964’s Gertrud, the dour final work by the Dan­ish direc­tor Carl Theodor Drey­er. Both films are con­cerned with the mys­ter­ies of love, but employ­ing a unique (and unique­ly aus­tere) dra­mat­ic approach, they man­age to drill right down to love’s masochis­tic core.

In these sto­ries, love is muta­ble and inde­fin­able. It’s trag­ic too – they say we must phys­i­cal­ly chop a bloody sinew from our­selves to make space for an ad-hoc con­nec­tion. Reynolds sews secret mes­sages into the hem of his gar­ments, and this phan­tom thread­ing could be read as his way of imbu­ing an inan­i­mate object with life or a spir­it. He makes minia­ture state­ments that no one sees or even knows about. His con­cept of affec­tion is an pri­vate, unread­able inscrip­tion on his soul.

The thread is also a life­line that keeps a per­son con­nect­ed to san­i­ty. Alma even­tu­al­ly teth­ers out the thread as far as it will go because she has noth­ing left to lose. This is Anderson’s most sedate and humane movie – it chills you in the moment and then destroys you over the long haul. The film’s eccen­tric, and dark­ly mag­i­cal con­clu­sion frames love as a wil­ful act of hurt­ing anoth­er so you can relearn to pity them. Each scene melts into the next through a lan­guorous cross-fade and this cycli­cal expres­sion of bruis­ing romance plays on until the final curtain.