The 2017 film Phantom Thread is written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Reynolds Woodcock, Leslie Manville as Cyril Woodcock and Vicky Krieps as Alma Elson. The film is set in post war London in 1954. Reynolds Woodcock is a famous fashion designer who along with his sister Cyril runs the House of Woodstock which caters to elite clients.
The film begins with an eerie sense of foreboding with an opening clip of Alma relating the intimate details of her romantic relationship with Reynolds, which is heightened by Jonny Greenwood’s brilliant musical score. The sense of foreboding is further heightened early on in the film by the theme of death and by what Reynolds tells his sister Cyril regarding their dead mother. “I have an unsettled feeling. Based on nothing I can put my finger on. Just butterflies. Been having the strongest memories of mama lately, coming to me in my dreams. Smelling her scent. The strongest sense that she is near us. Reaching out towards us. I very much hope that she saw the dress tonight. Don’t you? It’s comforting to think the dead are watching over the living. I don’t find that spooky at all”. The bachelor Reynolds meets Alma at a country restaurant where she works as a waitress and takes his huge order for breakfast. Reynolds flirts with Alma while giving her the order and then asks her out on a date for dinner.
On the previous day at breakfast Reynolds coldly and callously refused the pastries offered to him by his lover Johanna with whom he abruptly ended his relationship. Reynolds is a brilliant dress designer but he is an extremely difficult man with a reputation of having had many lovers and who can be very callous and ruthless in the way he discards his lovers when he is bored with them.
The film suggests that Reynolds had an Oedipal relationship with his mother, which is revealed by what he tells Alma about his mother. “She’s here in the canvas. You can sew almost anything into the canvas of a coat. Secrets, coins, words, little messages. When I was a boy I started to hide things in the linings of garments. Things that only I knew were there. And over my breast I have a lock of my mother’s hair, to keep her close to me always. She was quite a remarkable woman.
She taught me my trade. So, I try to never be without her. I made this dress for her when I was 16 years old. It was for her second husband, for the wedding. My father had died many years before.” The film also suggests an incestuous relationship between Reynolds and Cyril whom he refers to as his “old so-and-so”.
Reynolds meets his match in Alma who is equally or more ruthless than him. Alma appears to be a shy and timid woman at the beginning of the film, and Reynolds thinks that she would be just another conquest. But Alma is a tough and manipulative woman who wants to be more than an object of pleasure that Reynolds will get rid of when he becomes bored.
When Reynolds rejects Alma’s attempts to have a serious relationship by organising a romantic dinner, she poisons his food with a poisonous mushroom which makes him fall ill. When Reynolds is ill in bed he sees his mother’s ghost in the wedding dress he stitched for her. Alma knows from previous experience with Reynolds that he can be very tender and vulnerable and needs to be mothered when he is ill.
But poisoning Reynolds’s food is an unacceptable way of trying to have a serious relationship with him. Reynolds falls for Alma’s scheme and proposes marriage to her and they get married.
But Reynolds soon realises that he has made a mistake by marrying Alma and the theme of death is once again explored in the film when he tells Cyril. “I’ve made a terrible mistake in my life Cyril. I’ve made a terrible mistake. I need you to help me… She does not fit in this house. She is turning the place upside down.
She’s turning me inside out. She’s turning you and me against each other. Her arrival has cast a very long shadow, Cyril. There is an air of quiet death in this house and I do not like how it smells.”
The film explores a deadly relationship between a man and woman who are not compatible. Reynolds can never be a good husband to any woman because of his complex relationship with his mother and his sister Cyril, and Alma is a ruthless and calculating lower class woman who enters into a relationship with the upper class Reynolds for mercenary motives and to climb up the social ladder.
The film is also about secrets, curses and the supernatural, and suggests that both Reynolds and Cyril who is a spinster are cursed and have sinister family secrets. When Reynolds proposes to Alma he tells her that he needs to marry her in order to “break a curse”. And Reynolds stitches the words “never cursed” into the hemline of the wedding dress of a Belgian princess. Reynolds mother’s ghost is very real and not a mere figment of his imagination.
The film is a study in psychology which lends itself to an analysis of both Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalysis and Oedipus complex which is explored in his book titled The Interpretation of Dreams and also of Carl Gustav Jung’s Parapsychology and supernatural which is explored in his book titled Dreams. The film’s script is beautifully written and well directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis and Leslie Manville give excellent performances.