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Phantom Thread (2017)

THIS FILM IS OLD ENOUGH THAT THERE ARE INNUMERABLE SPOILERS AHEAD:

Question: How did you get the idea for Phantom Thread? Is it true that you were under the weather and being cared for?

PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON: That’s true. When I get sick, I deal with it in a few different ways. First, I get very cranky and I pretend that I’m not sick because I don’t want to be slowed down. I don’t want to miss anything. Usually, that can work. But if that doesn’t work, and you get really sick and you’re flat on your back, you need help and you become vulnerable. I remember that I was very sick, just with the flu, and I looked up and my wife (Maya Rudolph) looked at me with tenderness that made me think, “I wonder if she wants to keep me this way, maybe for a week or two.” I was watching the wrong movies when I was in bed, during this illness. I was watching Rebecca, The Story of Adele H., and Beauty and the Beast, and I really started to think that maybe she was poisoning me. So, that kernel of an idea, I had in my mind when I started working on writing something.
-INTERVIEW: Paul Thomas Anderson on Phantom Thread, Daniel Day-Lewis (Christina Radish, Feb 9, 2018, Collider)

I’m not sure what I expected from this film, but what PTA delivers is a very funny tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, generally, and to Psycho, in particular. The protagonist, Reynolds Woodcock, is a detail-obsessed couturier who lives with, and is cared for by, his sister. She is the one who runs his business, makes sure that nothing is allowed to bother his concentration and even disposes of girlfriends when they reach their sell-by date.

After she ditches his last one, Reynolds goes motoring off to the countryside where he meets a young waitress, Alma (derived from alma mater or benevolent mother), of indeterminate European nationality and makes her his latest muse. Nope. That’s wrong. Rather, she is just his latest mannequin. In what passes for a seduction scene he takes her measurements while his sister notes them down. He compliments her on not having any breasts and sis notes that she’s perfect because he likes that she has a bit of a belly. She is an object.

As the story unfolds, we discover that Reynolds’s dress-making is a tribute to his seamstress mother, whose wedding dress he sewed as a young man–the superstition being that touching your own dress would bring about a curse. More than that, he keeps a lock of her hair next to his heart. And he imagines her to be omnipresent, even hallucinating her physical presence:

Reynolds Woodcock: [to the vision of his mother] Are you here? Are you always here? I miss you. I think about you all the time. I hear your voice say my name when I dream and when I wake up, there are tears streaming down my face. I just miss you, it's as simple as that. I want to tell you everything. I don't understand what you're saying. I can't hear your voice.

In essence, he is Norman Bates, preserving Mother long after she is dead. Where Norman practiced taxidermy, Reynolds has his mannequins. And women are disposable, if not quite as literally as at the Bates Motel.

The worm turns though when Alma decides to fight back against being dismissed. She decides to replace the remembered mother by poisoning him and then nursing him back to health. The substitution is sufficiently effective to win his hand in marriage, but then he starts to tire of her again. So, what else can a girl do but poison him again. Only this time, she does so in a way that he will realize what is happening and even explains it to him:

Alma: I want you flat on your back. Helpless, tender, open with only me to help. And then I want you strong again. You're not going to die. You might wish you're going to die, but you're not going to. You need to settle down a little.

Perversely enough, he embraces the deal: “Kiss me, my girl, before I'm sick." Oh, son, you’re already sick.

There’s a brief cutaway scene to Alma pushing a perambulator, but it’s as unimaginable that Reynolds would share his mother substitute with another as it is that Alma would need another child. The image seems more a depiction of her placing Reynolds in a figurative stroller. He has acted like a big baby throughout the film and now has become hers.

Some have cited Reynolds as an avatar of toxic masculinity, though he really just seems pitiful. In fairness, his dresses offer at least a promise of beauty to the women who get to wear them. As Alma says:

I never really liked myself. I thought my - shoulders were too wide. My neck was - skinny like a bird. And I had no breasts. I felt my - hips were larger than needed and my arms too strong.

But then:

In his work, I become perfect - and I feel just right. Maybe that's how all women feel, in his clothes.

But, truthfully, the clothes aren’t particularly lovely. They may be well-constructed, but they certainly aren’t beautiful, are maybe even plain, and at one point he seems to have repeated a design just in different colors. Trumpan Capote once said of Jack Kerouac that On the Road wasn’t writing, just typing. Reynolds, likewise, isn’t so much stying as sewing.

If anything, the gender imbalance is most visible in how comfortable the clothes he gets to wear look, as compared to how uncomfortable the women’s are. A wedding dress he makes for a bloated drunken client seems especially annoying to have to wear.

So, finally, we’re left with a not overly talented man, with an over-structured life, who needs a Mommy. He’s laughable and, to PTA’s credit, he’s played for laughs. Where Hitchcock took Freudian psychodrama quite seriously–besides Psycho, in films like Spellbound and Vertigo–Phantom Thread borders on parody and the result is quite funny, if somewhat unsettling.

(Reviewed:11-Sep-25)

Grade: (A-)

Websites:

Question: How did you get the idea for Phantom Thread? Is it true that you were under the weather and being cared for?

PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON: That’s true. When I get sick, I deal with it in a few different ways. First, I get very cranky and I pretend that I’m not sick because I don’t want to be slowed down. I don’t want to miss anything. Usually, that can work. But if that doesn’t work, and you get really sick and you’re flat on your back, you need help and you become vulnerable. I remember that I was very sick, just with the flu, and I looked up and my wife (Maya Rudolph) looked at me with tenderness that made me think, “I wonder if she wants to keep me this way, maybe for a week or two.” I was watching the wrong movies when I was in bed, during this illness. I was watching Rebecca, The Story of Adele H., and Beauty and the Beast, and I really started to think that maybe she was poisoning me. So, that kernel of an idea, I had in my mind when I started working on writing something.

    -INTERVIEW: Paul Thomas Anderson: ’You can tell a lot about a person by what they order for breakfast’ : The director is back, with another charismatic obsessive – this time a 1950s couture designer – in Phantom Thread. But his brush with fashion has not left him with a taste for togs (Catherine Shoard, 1 Feb 2018, The Guardian)
    -INTERVIEW: The needle and the damage done: Paul Thomas Anderson on Phantom Thread: In this piece from our February 2018 issue, Paul Thomas Anderson discusses Phantom Thread, his gothic romance set in 1950s London, and reflects on the rigid world of haute couture, the English class system and working with Daniel Day-Lewis. (James Bell, February 2018, BFI: Sight and Sound)
    -INTERVIEW: Paul Thomas Anderson on Perfectionism and Making ‘Phantom Thread’ (Oliver Lunn, February 1, 2018, Vice)
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    -REVIEW ESSAY: When Muse Becomes Mother (Travis LaCouter, March 8, 2018, Commonweal)

Finally, hurt once too much, she takes drastic action that results in his incapacitation. She couldn’t care less about the impact on the business or his art; she’s happy only that she has Reynolds where she wants him: “flat on his back—helpless, tender, open, with only me to help.” Now it is Alma shutting doors in Cyril’s face, rather than the other way around. Now it is Alma mistakenly being referred to by a visiting doctor as “Mrs. Woodcock” (they are not married, but she doesn’t bother correcting him). Now it is Alma who is allowed to see the great artist vulnerable. Reynolds in his weakened state has a vision of his late beloved mother, and indeed it is a mother that he needs at that moment. Living up to her name, Alma becomes alma mater, and, finally, perhaps for the first time in her life, feels the feeling of being needed. Reynolds recuperates and proposes to her: thus mother becomes bride and the pair embarks upon a desperate quest to regain that one moment of clarity.

    -ESSAY: The Master?: Paul Thomas Anderson as American auteur (Nick Pinkerton, 12/15/17, The Point)
    -ESSAY: How ‘The Master’ Untangles ‘Phantom Thread’: With its themes of control and submission,Paul Thomas Anderson’s newest work acts as a companion piece to the 2012 film that might be his masterpiece (Adam Nayman.Dec. 29, 2017, The Ringer)
    -INTERVIEW: Touring Masterworks: Adam Nayman Discusses His New Book on Paul Thomas Anderson (Matt Zoller Seitz, October 7, 2020, Roger Ebert)
    -ESSAY: “A Whole Ocean of Oil Under Our Feet”: ‘There Will Be Blood’ at 10: The power and pain of Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece only grows deeper with each passing year (Sean Fennessey, Dec. 22, 2017, The Ringer)
    -ESSAY: The 25 Best Films of the 21st Century (Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, June 9, 2017, NY Times)
    -ESSAY: “Phantom Thread” Is the Best Food Movie in Ages (Helen Rosner, January 23, 2018, The New Yorker)
    -ESSAY: Make the Case: Why ‘Phantom Thread’ Deserves Best Picture: Please don’t make Paul Thomas Anderson the next Martin Scorsese. We’re begging you (Sean Fennessey, Feb. 22, 2018, The Ringer).
    -ESSAY: Make the Case: Lesley Manville Is the Real Genius of ‘Phantom Thread’: The meticulous master of the House of Woodcock is a first-time Oscar nominee who, at 61, is finally getting the recognition that she has long deserved (K. Austin CollinsFeb. 1, 2018, The Ringer)
    -ESSAY: Psychoanalyze Me, Mommy: Making Sense of the Mother Role in Phantom Thread (Sophie Durbin, 3/14/25, Perisphere)

The intro of Freudian Psychoanalysis for Dummies3 includes an overview of the Oedipus complex, in which the son’s initial sexual impulses are directed towards his mother, and his first feelings of rage or hostility are directed toward his father. Part of a “normal” childhood is overcoming these instincts in order to fully separate from one’s parents. If that separation is botched, the son’s adult relationships will also be dysfunctional. Reynolds is a textbook case study of a man who failed to healthily move out of his initial dependence and attraction to his mother, now deceased. His every action is in response to his longing for her, particularly the act of dressmaking, which she taught him how to do. So: his career isn’t just his vocation—it is devotional. His very livelihood is a series of tightly controlled acts entirely dedicated to keeping her memory, and he spends his days adhering to a strict routine without which he cannot properly partake in this ritual. When Reynolds meets Alma, his first intimate gesture is to measure her and sew a dress for her. He entangles his romantic life with his work, and with his ongoing reverence for his mother.

Fundamentally incapable of functioning without a mother figure, Reynolds’s older sister Cyril fills in. His associations with Cyril have been entwined with his mother since long before her death: when he made her wedding dress for his mother’s second marriage, Cyril “came to his rescue” to assist with the sewing. (In the original screenplay, he explains that he used Cyril as “his first mannequin” for the dress form. Imagine: designing a wedding dress for a mother’s second marriage to a man he may have resented, using his sister as a model…will we ever get any relief from this Freudian onion?) Cyril doesn’t just manage the administrative aspects inside the House of Woodcock. She also breaks up with Reynolds’s girlfriends for him, is allowed into his private chamber even when Alma is not, and manages his social calendar like a mother would for her school-age son. Cyril takes the role that usually would be taken by an eventual wife. Freud wrote a lot about “incest dread”—that is, the near-universal taboo against parent/child and sibling sexual relationships. Here, Cyril and Reynolds have formed an arrangement that very nearly violates this taboo, and when Alma appears it seems she is there to intervene, freeing Reynolds from his dependence on his sister-mother. Of course, there are complications.

Shortly before Alma enters the picture, Reynolds shares with Cyril, “I’ve had the strongest memories of Mama lately. Coming to me in dreams, smelling her scent, the strongest sense that she is near me … reaching out.” The audience is primed for Alma’s arrival, and subtly informed of the role she will take in Reynolds’s life. He first meets her at a restaurant in the countryside, where she is working as a waitress. Alma trips and blushes (we see the blush actually spread in real time over Vicky Krieps’s face—thrilling!). Charmed when she comes to take his order, he requests nearly everything on the menu. The power dynamic is initially set up to make us think that it’s her youth or naivete that attracts Reynolds. But within moments, a strange energy moves over the table. It’s apparent that he is ravenous; Alma has stirred his appetite. He pauses, looks up at her, and asks: “What else?” His tone is childish, his hands are in his lap. The scenario is no longer a power play between an older man and a younger woman—it’s a young boy asking his mother for another snack. This theme recurs. When Reynolds is hungry, it is always wrapped up with desire. Reynolds’s sexual needs are wound up in his literal hunger, his need to be fed. It’s an immature association, a reminder of the primal connection to his mother that he never successfully severed. When he and Alma finally sleep together for the first time, it’s because she has noticed this linkage and chooses to seduce him with it: “Are you sure you’ve had enough to eat?”

Like I said, there are complications. Frustrated by her inability to be needed by Reynolds, and his refusal to modify any aspect of his entrenched routines for her, Alma discovers that she can access a more “tender, open” version of him when he is feeling ill (“like a baby,” she describes to Dr. Hardy). She takes full advantage of this knowledge by poisoning him with mushrooms so that he is incapacitated and utterly dependent on her care. Moved by this mother/son roleplay, Reynolds proposes to her and, after a few rocky months, is eventually fondly accustomed to being occasionally poisoned in order to “settle down a little.” In the final moments of the film, a flash-forward shows Alma pushing a baby carriage; this image is quickly dismissed as we return to the present, where no such child exists. Alma doesn’t need a new child to become a mother, because she has found balance in being both wife and mother to Reynolds himself. Distilled through Dr. Hardy’s vision or not, it’s a psychoanalytic case study for the ages.

    -ESSAY: Phantom Thread Ending Explained: What It All Means (Colin McCormick & Arthur Goyaz, Sep 22, 2023, Screen Rant)
    -ESSAY: PHANTOM THREAD: What’s It Really About? Reynolds & Alma’s Perverse Feeding Game? Dr. Sandra E. Cohen, 3/01/18, Characters on the Couch)
    -ESSAY: Talking “Cure” in Phantom Thread (Michael Harwick, 1/23/18, Uncertain Regards)
    -ESSAY: Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread and the Sins of the Artist (The Film Doctor, 2/04/18)
    -ESSAY: Phantom Thread Ending, Explained: Why Does Alma Poison Woodcock? (Dhruv Trivedi, January 20, 2022, The Cinemaholic)
    -ESSAY: How Phantom Thread undresses our ideas about toxic masculinity : Paul Thomas Anderson’s sly and subversive romance presents us with a tortured male creative genius but surprises us with what’s in store for him (Guy Lodge, 2 Jan 2018, The Guardian)
    -ESSAY: Phantom Thread: When bad fashion is good costume design (Cláudio Alves, 6/07/20, The Film Experience)
    -ESSAY: The Dynamics Of Voyeurism In Psycho And Phantom Thread (Lauren Humphries-Brooks, January 24, 2018, Suddenly a shot rang out)
    -ESSAY: Phantom Thread: An Ode to Hitchcock (Bianca Garner, February 8, 2018, Filmotomy)
    -ESSAY: 3 Films That Can Help You Understand Phantom Thread (Alex Thompson, 2/03/18, Horror Homeroom)
    -ESSAY: Appetite for Destruction: Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Phantom Thread’ and the Fall of the House of Woodcock (Tim Pelan, Cinephilia Beyond)
    -ESSAY: The Directorial Excellence of Paul Thomas Anderson: Five things that make Phantom Thread’s writer/director legendary (Focus Films, 1/25/18)
    -ESSAY: The Enduring Legend of Philip Seymour Hoffman: As The Ringer celebrates the best performances of the 21st century, it’s time to also celebrate one of the best actors of the 21st century (Adam Nayman, 8/26/25, The Ringer)
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    -REVIEW: Daniel Day-Lewis Sews Up Another Great Performance in ‘Phantom Thread’ (A.O. Scott, Dec. 24, 2017, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: Phantom Thread Review: The Most Surprising Love Story of the Year: Paul Thomas Anderson has made an unexpectedly charming film. (Richard Lawson, December 19, 2017, Vanity Fair)
    -REVIEW: Phantom Thread Is Too Good to Keep a Secret: Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie, featuring the performance that Daniel Day-Lewis says will be his last, is a marvel of craft too beautiful to miss and too delicate to spoil. (Dana Stevens, Dec 19, 2017, Slate)
    -REVIEW: Nothing Is Quite As It Seems in ‘Phantom Thread’: Paul Thomas Anderson’s sumptuous chamber drama studies the shifts in power among an obsessive dressmaker, his sister, and his love interest. Most of all, it is another indelible performance by Daniel Day-Lewis. (K. Austin Collins, Dec. 20, 2017, The Ringer)
    -REVIEW: of Phantom Thread (Glenn Kenny, December 18, 2017, Roger Ebert)
    -REVIEW: The Best Films of the 2010s: Phantom Thread (Peter Sobczynski, November 5, 2019, Roger Ebert)
    -REVIEW: of Phantom Thread (Dominick Suzanne-Mayer, Jan 15, 2018, Consequence)
    -REVIEW: Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Phantom Thread’ Is A Beguiling, Unnerving Love Story Only He Could Make (Keith Phipps, December 7, 2017, Uproxx)
    -REVIEW: of Phantom Thread (Tim Grierson, 7 December 2017, Screen Daily)
    -REVIEW: of Phantom Thread (Todd McCarthy, December 7, 2017, Hollywood Reporter)
    -REVIEW: of Phantom Thread: The film arrives at a place of qualified peace that cauterizes the emotional wounds of Anderson’s cinema. (Chuck Bowen, December 7, 2017, Slant)
    -REVIEW: of Phantom Thread: Daniel Day-Lewis retires in style with a thrillingly kinky fashion romance (Robbie Collin, 31 January 2018, The Telegraph)
    -REVIEW: of Phantom Thread review – Daniel Day-Lewis bows out in style with drama of delicious pleasure: In his final film, Day-Lewis reunites with Paul Thomas Anderson to deliver a masterful performance as a society dressmaker beguiled by a young waitress (Peter Bradshaw, 7 Dec 2017, The Guardian)
    -REVIEW: of Phantom Thread (James Berardinelli, 12/23/17, Reel Reviews)
    -REVIEW: of Phantom Thread (My Meaningful Movies)
    -REVIEW: of Phantom Thread (Andrew Voorhees, Medium)
    -REVIEW: “Phantom Thread”: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Furious Fusion of Art and Love (Richard Brody, December 27, 2017, The New Yorker)
    -REVIEW: of Phantom Thread (Did you see that? Did you hear that?)
    -REVIEW: of Phantom Thread (SwampFlix)
    -REVIEW: Phantom Thread review: "Anderson crafts another classic of obsession and strange love" (Kevin Harley, January 29, 2018, Games Radar)
    -REVIEW: ‘Phantom Thread’, Paul Thomas Anderson Creates Beauty By Sewing Chaos (John Nolan, 1/17/18, Punch Drunk Critics)
    -REVIEW: Phantom Thread is a Rom-Com, Actually (Hannah Searson, Film Obsessive)
    -REVIEW: Phantom Thread Film Review: Power Mind Games (Hayley Croke, April 28, 2024, Loud and Clear)
    -REVIEW: On Love and Genius (Sammi Gale, 02.2018, Plinth)
    -REVIEW: Phantom Thread Review: The Most Surprising Love Story of the Year: Paul Thomas Anderson has made an unexpectedly charming film. (Richard Lawson, December 19, 2017, Vanity Fair)
    -REVIEW: PHANTOM THREAD is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Twisted Love Story About the Beauty in Ugliness (M. Arbeiter, December 7, 2017, Nerdist)
    -REVIEW: Phantom Thread: A masterpiece of photochemical glory (Tyler Purcell, December 26, 2017, Cinematography)
    -REVIEW: “Phantom Thread”: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Furious Fusion of Art and Love (Richard Brody, December 27, 2017, The New Yorker)
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Phantom Thread (2017)

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