Phantom Thread Review

Anderson shot this himself and hired no cinematographer, and the film looks it in the best sense: the frames sit close to faces at breakfast and hold there while a marriage gets decided over the sound of butter scraped onto toast. For an hour it appears to be a portrait of an exacting man, with Daniel Day-Lewis playing Reynolds Woodcock as a dressmaker whose routines are a fortress. Then the picture reveals itself as a comedy about power, and Vicky Krieps, not Day-Lewis, is the one running it.

Krieps holds the screen against the most celebrated actor of his generation and never blinks, which is the performance nobody saw coming. Lesley Manville gets the driest lines written in 2017. Jonny Greenwood's score is romantic in a way his work rarely is, all piano and strings, and it lets cruelty sound like devotion. The film is cold on purpose and the first act reads as pastiche until the game shows its hand. Stay for the mushrooms. It is the funniest thing Anderson has made.