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Phantom Thread is a film with a swag of nominations at this year's Oscars, including Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis.
The 60-year-old English thespian has announced it will be his last role, which is a tragedy given how good he is in it.
Set amid the austerity of 1950s London in a world of rare glamour, he plays Reynolds Woodcock, a softly-spoken, rake-thin English couturier who makes clothes for the aristocracy and the super rich.
His partner is his sister Cyril (Leslie Manville), a prim woman who keeps an attentive side eye on his affairs — both financial and sentimental.
Together they run the day-to-day happenings of the business from a modest townhouse, overseeing a half-dozen elderly seamstresses, and ushering in privileged women who pay to feel transformed by exquisite tailoring and sumptuous fabrics.
But when Reynolds falls for Alma, a rosy-cheeked hotel waitress from Eastern Europe (Vicky Krieps), the emotional upheaval threatens everything.
Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Punch Drunk Love, The Master) is one of the most refined filmmakers working in Hollywood, and Phantom Thread — shot by Anderson on luminescent celluloid — sees him operating at the highest level.
What begins as an almost Pygmalion story, where Reynolds exerts a passive-aggressive control over his much younger, less refined lover, transforms into a battle of wills in subtle, then disturbing ways.
With a slightly dissonant, neo-modern score by Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood, the story heads into the tortured terrain of gothic romance. It's a sweet-sour place of cruelty and tender devotion that only these lovers — and the audience, thanks to the director's delicate hand — can possibly comprehend.
Anderson has cited Hitchock's films — with their themes of male obsession and female enigma, notably the 1940 romance Rebecca — as inspiration.
His film approaches a similar intensity once the slow burn of the courtship gives way to a darker, more manipulative game, and Alma shows Reynolds her hand.
Part of what the tailor must confront is a thoroughly contemporary dilemma about work/life balance. But Alma delivers an ultimatum that's far from straightforward.
Like Sofia Coppola's Beguiled remake, another recent film about a table-turning gender battle, the message involves a dish of mushrooms and some extreme indigestion.
With this, Anderson is gambling on his audience taking a leap with him into the extreme, as he did in Punch Drunk Love or the milkshake monologue Day-Lewis delivered in There Will Be Blood.
Once again the leap pays off, just.
Maybe it's because Phantom Thread comes close to landing flat on its face that it ends up such a breathtaking experience.
Maybe it's also because, hidden beneath the psychological layers, lies a deeper theme, about the trauma of a war, that is barely mentioned.
On reflection, this idea resonates long after the film is over, a key to what makes Phantom Thread as beautiful as it is disturbing.
Like a cinematic swan dive into the shadows.
Topics: film-movies, romance-films, australia
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