There’s something endearing, but also puzzling, about Paul Thomas Anderson’s romantic partnership with actress-comedian Maya Rudolph. Forgive me for delving into a director’s personal life, but Phantom Thread, the new film from the celebrated auteur opening December 25, kind of feels like an invitation for some gentle scrutiny. So, I’m gonna do it. On the one side you have Anderson, whose past three films have been elusive, esoteric pieces, studied, formal, intense, and a little cold. And then there’s Rudolph, such a loose, warm, amiably goofy performer and personality. What is the secret to this union of seeming opposites, which has lasted for 16 years and produced four children? I think Phantom Thread offers some answers to that question, in unexpectedly sweet and strange fashion.

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Phantom Thread is the second movie this season that finds a lauded writer-director processing how he, as an artist, has functioned in his personal relationships. In September, Darren Aronofsky gave us a hectic, harrowing allegorical look at a creator who’s also a destroyer with Mother!—a movie starring the woman he was dating at the time of filming, and that seems to refer back to a past marriage with another famous actress. The film is stuffed with biblical allusion and is, to my mind, a pompous, sneakily self-exonerating mess. Some people loved it, of course.

Give me Anderson’s version of that same inquest over Aronofsky’s any day. Like Mother!, Phantom Thread is about an unyielding artist. Daniel Day-Lewis, giving us one last blessing before he disappears into his version of retirement, plays Reynolds Woodcock, a sought-after high-end dress designer in 1950s London. Reynolds is exacting and frequently lost in indulgent distraction, wrapping himself up in his genius and expecting all those around him to be in his low orbit—to be called on and used whenever he is ready but to otherwise remain out of the way. Which means he’s not the best guy to date, dismissing women when they’ve begun to annoy him in some petty way, or when they get too close to seeing beyond whatever tortured artist bullshit he’s steeped himself in. (There’s a dead mother, of course.)

Which is, perhaps, a familiar character. But what Anderson does with this pile of chauvinist ego and entitlement is continually surprising. Most crucially, Anderson puts two formidable women beside Reynolds, and Phantom Thread undergoes a disarming transformation from chilly portrait of a cruel and powerful male narcissist to what could be described as a romantic comedy. The great Lesley Manville plays Reynolds’s sister, Cyril, a crisp and commanding business partner—and, in subtle ways, a confidant. She does the breaking up for Reynolds, firmly but not unkindly giving the current despondent young lady the boot when Reynolds has tired of her. That’s the formula until the arrival of Alma (Vicky Krieps), an émigré waitress Reynolds brings from the countryside to London, installing her in his stately townhome as his muse and lover. It’s an arrangement we just know will end at some point, and badly—because this is a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, and some sense of ruin or despair tends to arrive eventually in his films.

But Phantom Thread is something else, quite welcomely. As Reynolds and Alma circle one another, figuring out their dynamic by testing and prodding to see where boundaries lie, something like actual parity gradually develops between them. I won’t say how, exactly, because that would be something of a spoiler. But by the film’s lovely, darkly amusing end, it’s become clear that Reynolds and Alma have found some corresponding need and understanding within each other, that theirs is a bond that works because it sometimes breaks, because it’s dramatic and odd and makes a bizarre kind of sense only to them.

Which is a hell of a testament to a marriage (unofficial or not), isn’t it? After seeing the film, I found myself thinking how touched I would be if I were Rudolph, watching a film that’s so ardently honest (if a bit exaggerated) about the charged and complex exchanges of couplehood, the peculiar compromises of commitment. There’s a “you and me babe, against the world” kind of vibe to Phantom Thread—it winks with the conspiratorial coziness of a private joke. It’s fiercely romantic, in its improbable way. Cyril does not get shoved off to the side, either. Her and her brother’s relationship gets its fair due, its own affectionate assessment. (How often are brother-sister dynamics between older people explored in cinema? Not very!) What initially seems like another alienating P.T.A. outing reveals itself, in quiet but glorious bursts, to be a wry and heartfelt love poem.

And how ravishing it is. Anderson does his own cinematography, styling the film with a grainy, muted texture—tailored and expensive but lived-in. Jonny Greenwood’s lush, indispensable score is—I’m gonna say it—the fourth major character in the film. His compositions are airborne on curious breezes, lilting and sinister, playful and sincere. It’s just gorgeous work, as integral to the experience of the film as its sterling trio of lead actors.

Day-Lewis is a lot smaller here than he was in his first collaboration with Anderson, 2007’s howling There Will Be Blood. Which is a nice change. In Day-Lewis’s hands, Reynolds is a bully and a brat, but we see some bits of decency peeking out through all his measured prickliness. He’s obnoxious, this man who professionally, arrogantly instructs women how to comport themselves and then treats it as empowerment. But he’s also funny and charming in his moody way. There are a few moments of towering anger, but mostly Day-Lewis keeps things interior; Reynolds is a more reserved and watchful kind of jerk. He’s complemented well by Manville, who plays Cyril with a flinty poise that does not deny her her humanity. Unmarried herself, Cyril could easily have been rendered a brittle spinster. But Manville and Anderson instead give Cyril a confidence, a knowing, a self-possession that feels a bit revolutionary. She’s not alone. Because she has Reynolds, yes. But also because she has her business, and she has herself.

It’s Krieps, though, who—mostly unknown to me before this—makes the strongest impression. The Luxembourg actress has been handed a complicated role: a woman who’s both antagonized and antagonizing, an increasingly autonomous half of this alternately thrashing and tender pas de deux. Krieps finds just the right bearing through the material, mixing the pain and the humor and the slightly more surreal stuff to stand strongly toe-to-toe with Day-Lewis. It’s a terrific breakthrough performance, wise and clever and sexy. Alma is quite a creation. If that was how my filmmaker partner wanted to show some version of me to the world, I think I’d be a pretty happy muse indeed.

But then again, what do I know about what the film means to Maya Rudolph? Or about what any gesture means to any couple, really? As Phantom Thread winningly argues, it doesn’t much matter how I see it, or how anyone else on the outside does. In the end, there’s only one person who really needs to get it—and only one person who really can.