Phantom Thread

In 1971, Daniel Day-Lewis started his film career playing a young vandal in Sunday Bloody Sunday. We now get to see the film he's promised will be his last. It's Phantom Thread, a dark, yet happy love story.

Day-Lewis is Reynolds Woodcock, a fashion designer in 1950s London. His life is nice and orderly. His sister, Cyril (Leslie Manville), helps ensure it. But then he meets a waitress named Alma (Vicky Krieps). They fall in love and she becomes his assistant. Reynolds soon doesn't take kindly to his routine getting disrupted. Alma just wants to be a part of it. She might have to do something desperate.

Writer/Director Paul T. Anderson keeps things going for a surprisingly quick 130 minutes. Not one minute felt a second longer. It was an involving Gothic Romance that was equally dark and funny. Reynolds' obsessive stubbornness is either one given the situation. Alma turns him around at the end, though. The ending might have some question their version of "happily ever after." I did.

Day-Lewis is great as usual as Reynolds. He's a soft-spoken man with a tortured past. We understand his mindset even if we don't agree with his outbursts. Krieps as Alma is just a strong performance as his. She's an endearing character who genuinely loves Reynolds. But she finds herself overwhelmed by his aloofness. She wins out with an extreme act of desperation. Manville's Cyril is relatively low-key but her dry wit makes her a memorable character.

Mark Bridges dresses the characters in memorable fashions. They're not extravagant but their colors are still striking. There's quite a few fascinatingly eerie scenes photographed by an uncredited cinematographer, such as a New Years Eve party. The production and makeup design complete another great recreation of the 1950s. Jonny Greenwood earned his first Oscar nomination for another memorably eerie score. Though, I must say the opening theme was a bit loud.

Phantom Thread is a film that'll keep you thinking after the end. I had a few conflicting thoughts about the movie. But it's not as completely off-kilter as I feared. So we must wish Daniel Day-Lewis the best with his future endeavors as he ends his film career in a memorable way. It's not a conventional love story but it's a well-told one.