Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread is a film about the intractability of control in the face of interior and exterior emotional conditions that seek to, dually, nurture and destroy it. The two protagonists, Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Alma Elson (Vicky Krieps), are polar opposites in age, status and profession, and yet they are drawn together by work and, more importantly, a mutuality of temperament; a relentless desire to control a situation. The focal relationship is not so much a union as a collision course, a power struggle between two people who love and respect each other in totality, but for myriad reasons remain too stubborn to truly cede their power in the way that true love frequently necessitates. When viewed with this in mind, Phantom Thread is a borderline traditional romance about two dysfunctional people learning to live with one another.

Early moments establish that Reynolds is a renowned fashion designer. The man has a good relationship with his client Henrietta Harding (Gina McKee); he remembers the names of his staff and seemingly exists in symbiosis with his primly presented sister, Cyril (Leslie Manville). Reynolds has a younger partner, Johanna (Camilla Rutherford), with whom things seem to have run their course; she offers him a Danish pastry, which he declines coldly, and when she asks him where he’s gone, he issues the brittle missive that he can’t start his day with a confrontation. There are, in Phantom Thread’s opening stretch, two shots of Cyril staring almost directly at the viewer; one is a withering look at Johanna, the other is to nobody in particular as she readies her face to greet the Countess who is coming to pick up her dress. While Reynolds immediately seems fastidious and composed as an individual, Cyril comes across almost as his minder; she is the one who suggests that he end things with Johanna, offering to take care of the particulars.

There is a surplus of luxury and extravagance on display in Phantom Thread, both within the siblings’ home and within their meticulously upheld routines, which Anderson relishes over in close-ups of faces, hot mugs of tea, platters of pastries, needles, fabric and clothing. This visual splendor is not matched in the character interactions, which are marked by familiarity but not warmth. Cyril and Reynolds feel closed off and emotionally insular; it’s as if they are making up for the ineluctable sway of emotions by sticking, dogmatically, to a set text of behavioral codes and practices. The first concession to recognizable human behavior arrives 10 minutes in when Reynolds declares that he is thinking of his deceased mother and has a persistent uneasy feeling. Cyril suggests that he travel to the country, and says that she’ll join him later. 

Before Cyril arrives, Reynolds meets Alma as she is waitressing in a café. His breakfast order, hilarious in its extravagance and unwieldiness, gives way to the offer of a date, which gives way to a fitting session for a dress, which blossoms uneasily into a relationship of sorts between the pair. Even from the start, Reynolds and Alma can be snippy, barbed and unpleasant. Day-Lewis’ character is used to petulantly trampling his way through relationships (with the exception of Cyril), but his love interest is equally headstrong and counters him at each turn. Anderson does a clever thing in Phantom Thread by underlining the various verbal clashes with wit and precisely engineered comic timing. In one exchange, Alma complains about a fabric and gets verbally rebutted by both Cyril and Reynolds. This leads to a back-and-forth conversation about taste, with Alma insisting that her taste is perfectly fine. Reynolds, in a fit of frustration, barks “stop”; many exchanges conclude in this manner, leading viewers to question why the protagonists love each other. At one point, Alma says pridefully, in an ambiguous framing interview which reoccurs through the film, that she can stand for hours, for longer than anyone else; her love of Reynolds’ work and her faith in its greatness is never in doubt. One particularly excruciating scene at a high-profile wedding all but confirms this, as Alma forcefully reclaims a dress that has been besmirched by one of Reynolds’ wealthiest clients, Barbara Rose (Harriet Sansom Harris). 

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Although Phantom Thread is astute enough not to directly instruct the viewer of Alma’s true feelings, it is unavoidable (particularly upon rewatching the film) that she is displaced, which is the driving narrative force. Indeed, Alma’s insistence that she belongs in the House of Woodcock is perhaps the only truly realized desire within the story. While Anderson is unafraid of politics, any political statement proceeds (as do most things in his films) from character. Phantom Thread does not aim for the kind of critique that is found in, say, The Master (which seems to disassemble the power structure of cults from the inside, all whilst mirroring the fractured mindset of the broken people who would gravitate towards them), but it does succeed in subtly presenting Alma’s rootlessness. Anderson steadily positions Krieps’ character as the outsider she is desperately trying not to be — a reporter’s statement about funding Jews in the war (which arguably dictates Alma’s actions during the aforementioned wedding scene); Reynolds’ fleeting insistence that Alma is some kind of spy; a thinly-veiled antisemitic diatribe by Henriette Harding towards Alma. The filmmaker’s deftness comes in only utilizing these points when absolutely necessary; they allow Alma to remain intriguing and enigmatic, and Anderson does not fall into the trap of providing a solution along with his explanation. These moments also provide a brittle bone of subversion nestled amongst the opulent post-war luxury that has so clearly caught the director’s eye. 

In one crucial scene, a turning point within Phantom Thread, Alma negotiates with Cyril to have the house to herself for one evening so she can provide a treat for Reynolds. Manville’s character is insistent, and correctly so, that such a surprise would upend her brother, and that Alma should look for some other way to surprise him. While Cyril’s disdain is apparent, her advice is not unhelpful. Still, Alma insists that “I have to know him in my own way.” This is perhaps the key line of Phantom Thread. The meal that Alma cooks is disastrous, and she changes her approach after a volatile and quite funny exchange with Reynolds. Up until this point, Krieps’ character has been trying to act in accordance with what she wants, perhaps in the hope that her sincerity and good intent would be enough to overcome (or control) Reynolds’ petulance, arrogance, obstinacy and inability to deviate from his behavior patterns.  

Once Alma learns that this is not possible, she becomes much more overt in her attempts to claim what she wants. While foraging for mushrooms near Reynolds’ country house, Alma finds a poison mushroom and brews it in her lover’s tea. The ensuing sequence, which in many ways acts as the centerpiece of Phantom Thread, sees Reynolds in a state of feverish reverie, hallucinating images of his dead mother and telling the local doctor to fuck off. All the while, Alma attends to him dutifully and carefully; due to Reynolds’ complete surrender, she is finally able to be loved unconditionally, and love him in turn. It is only when the designer sequesters all control that Alma is able to love him free of the trappings of his job, free from Cyril and free from their own volatile natures. When Reynolds awakens from his illness, he asks Alma to marry him. She pauses, uncertain about the moment and in disbelief that her plan actually worked, and then says yes. 

Though this sequence is only referred to in passing later on in Phantom Thread, the final moments show Anderson pulling off the cinematic coup to which he’s been laying the groundwork for all along. Alma, having delicately prepared a mushroom omelette from that same poisonous fungi which had made Reynolds so ill before, presents it to her husband. She pours him some water in a way that recalls the very first scene in which they meet; delicately, and from a great height. As Reynolds inspects the omelette — first smelling it, holding it up to the light and then keeping the first forkful in his mouth — it seems that he’ll make one of his wild accusations (this time founded). Instead, the designer swallows. Kiss me, my girl, before I am sick,” he says. Alma and Reynolds have, at last, found the secret to loving each other.

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In a film that consistently and expertly draws a fine line between deep personal toxicity and lavish depictions of wealth and comfort, this is the final act of consummation-as-transgression towards which Anderson has been nudging the viewer all along. Reynolds’ predictions have, in a sense, come true; Alma has become a spy in the house of love, poisoning her victim and taking what she wants from while she does so. That Reynolds happily consents to this is merely proof that these two souls are, in some way, fated to be together.

The only question that remains is whether the viewer will roll over and cede to fate or counter fate’s turn.

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Phantom Thread’s final scene provides the act of transgression which completes the film, and it is transgression in a strictly Batailleian sense; for French philosopher Georges Bataille, the act of transgression was something that could only come with a deep awareness of the taboo. As he puts it: “Organised transgression together with the taboo make social life what it is.” Writing specifically of war, Bataille gives the example that animals, seen as completely distinct from man and given to indulging their base urges, do not go to war with one another: “War is organised violence. The transgression of the taboo is not animal violence. It is violence still, used by a creature capable of reason.” Transgression does not denote the giving way of all reason and boundaries; “often the transgression of a taboo is no less subject to rules than the taboo itself.” Instead, it represents a line in the sand beyond which the violation of taboos can be sanctioned, in accordance with the rules, we have delineated amongst ourselves. Its endpoint, Bataille theorizes, is death; “Death contravenes the taboo against the violence which is supposedly its cause.”