Paul Thomas Anderson's London couture drama. Daniel Day-Lewis's announced final performance, and a romance that ends in deliberate mushroom poisoning.
London, 1955. Reynolds Woodcock is a celebrated London couturier who dresses members of the British royal family, the European aristocracy, and various Hollywood stars. He lives with his sister Cyril, the operational manager of the House of Woodcock, in a Mayfair townhouse-and-atelier. Reynolds takes lovers from among the women who briefly orbit his work; each is dismissed, by Cyril's intervention, once she begins to be inconvenient.
On a weekend break in the country, Reynolds meets Alma, a young waitress at a country hotel. He brings her to London, fits her for a dress, and progressively absorbs her into his household. The film tracks the Reynolds-Alma relationship across roughly a year. The structural conflict is that Alma refuses to be dismissed in the way Reynolds's previous lovers have been. The film's resolution — Alma poisoning Reynolds with carefully-administered mushrooms, Reynolds eating the omelette knowing it is poisoned, the two settling into a mutually-aware pattern of poisoning-and-recovery — is one of the most-discussed endings in 2010s American cinema.
Daniel Day-Lewis announced his retirement from acting at the time of Phantom Thread's release. The film is, on this framing, the final performance of one of the most-respected acting careers in modern cinema. The role he chose to retire on is Reynolds Woodcock — a fastidious London couturier whose interior life depends on the specific control of his domestic environment, and whose marriage progressively dismantles that control.
The performance is structurally distinct from his three prior Best Actor Oscar-winning roles (My Left Foot 1989, There Will Be Blood 2007, Lincoln 2012). Reynolds Woodcock is more emotionally legible than Daniel Plainview, more domestic than Lincoln, less physically transformative than Christy Brown. The performance is, in some sense, Day-Lewis's most-restrained — the character's specific calibration is more about the precise physical comportment of a working couturier than about visible-acting transformation. He was nominated for Best Actor; he lost to Gary Oldman for Darkest Hour.
Lesley Manville's Cyril Woodcock — Reynolds's sister and house manager — is the third corner of the film's central triangle. Manville plays Cyril with the precise emotional restraint of a woman whose authority over her brother's domestic life is total but whose place in his romantic life is, structurally, secondary to whichever new woman has arrived. The performance is, by general critical consensus, the most-controlled supporting work in Anderson's catalogue. Manville was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.
The structural triangle the film constructs is unusual. Most three-character couture films would centre on the artist-muse relationship and treat the practical-manager figure as logistical support. Phantom Thread treats Cyril as the third equal participant. The film's resolution depends on Cyril's deliberate decision not to intervene; she sees Alma's deepening relationship with Reynolds and, in a quiet scene around halfway through the film, decides to let it proceed. The film's argument is partly that the marriage works because all three participants are, in some sense, choosing it.
The film's resolution — Alma poisoning Reynolds with carefully-prepared poisonous mushrooms, Reynolds discovering the poisoning, Reynolds eating the omelette anyway because the resulting illness will restore Alma's caretaking role in his life — is one of the most-debated endings in 2010s American cinema. The scene runs roughly five minutes. Reynolds tells Alma he loves her. He eats the omelette. The film closes on the two of them sitting in their domestic kitchen, both aware of what has happened.
What the ending does is propose that the Reynolds-Alma marriage will continue as a structurally cyclical arrangement of poisoning-and-recovery — that Alma's continued presence in Reynolds's life depends on her periodic ability to incapacitate him, and that Reynolds has, on some level, consented to this. The film's defenders argue this is the most-honest depiction of long-term mutual-dependence in any contemporary American film. The critics argue that the ending romanticises a relationship that, by ordinary social standards, would be classified as abuse. Both readings have textual support. The film is meant to provoke the argument.