“For the hungry boy,” scribbles a boarding-house waitress on a note of paper, before handing it back to her bewitched customer, after he orders an over-full English breakfast that could feed several men. So begins Paul Thomas Anderson’s glistening, magnificent Phantom Thread, and it’s a moment of rare, blithe sexiness in his oeuvre: a light little flirt-note – were the film set half a century later, it might be signed off with a smiley face – that sets in motion a far darker, more perverse and conflict-riven romance than most would expect from such breezy beginnings.

Phantom Thread review – Daniel Day-Lewis bows out in style with drama of delicious pleasure Read more

The hungry boy is Reynolds Woodcock, a high-end couturier played by Daniel Day-Lewis with a perma-arch, stately air worthy of that splendid name. The waitress is Alma (Vicky Krieps), a soft-spoken Belgian immigrant with hidden steel in her nerves. Her note is not the last time the matter of his appetite will be brought up between them, though it won’t always be over breakfast, or over food at all. Throughout Phantom Thread, at the basest metaphorical level, man hungers and woman feeds; where the power lies in this dynamic is often hard to determine, though it’s hard to describe how it shifts without giving away the film’s exquisitely twisted secrets.

Ravenous, even destructively toxic masculinity is hardly a new theme in Anderson’s oeuvre. Magnolia tackled it head-on via Tom Cruise’s performance as male-empowerment motivational speaker Frank TJ Mackey, a misogynist with a brittle alpha veneer and braying mantra of “respect the cock”. There Will Be Blood’s ruthless, loveless oil prospector Daniel Plainview craved possession of land and human souls in roughly equal measure; The Master gave us two spiritually poisoned men, each shaped and gnarled by dysfunctional relations with women, whose power struggle built into a crippled romance of egos.

Phantom Thread isn’t as outwardly harsh as any of these films: ultimately a romantic comedy of a particularly perverse persuasion, it glides and whispers, folding its most disturbing psychological ideas into a strangely tender spirit of seduction. Anderson tracks the courtship of Reynolds and Alma as a delicate, push-pull affair, each partner severely reactive to the other’s acts of charity or cruelty. Yet the fundamental glitch in their relationship is established as early as the first date. In one of the film’s most startling, grotesquely comic jabs, Reynolds takes Alma back to his place and has her undress – not, to both her and the audience’s bemusement, to make love to her, but to clinically take her measurements for a gown, with the sudden, businesslike assistance of his Mrs Danvers-like sister Cyril (Lesley Manville). Reynolds wants a model and a muse before he wants a lover; he just can’t quite parse the difference.

As such, the first half of Phantom Thread appears to pass along familiar lines: another story of a tortured male creative genius – yes, his gowns truly are gasp-worthy – taking out his art-fuelled frustrations and insecurities on a blameless female victim. It’s impeccably drawn, styled and performed, yet a nagging feeling sets in that we don’t particularly need to see a reiteration of that narrative in 2017, where the grim reality of powerful men (and male creators, in particular) abusing vulnerable women to advance their own work has been made all too plain in Hollywood and beyond. Phantom Thread may be set in 1950s London, but the gender politics it illustrates are, unhappily, still very much on-trend.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lesley Manville, seated left, and Vicky Krieps in Phantom Thread. Photograph: Laurie Sparham/AP

But Alma – and Anderson – have a surprise in store for us, as she gradually begins to assert herself in ways that aren’t immediately perceptible, steering their relationship into obliquely sadomasochistic territory; hunger is sated in ways that could as well be pulled from Mrs Beeton’s Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s neither a story of subjugation nor one of empowerment: as the lovers figure out ways to play their weaknesses against each other, all traditional notions of one-way control are out the window.

Phantom Thread might not play very well with the “Is [Insert Text] Feminist?” school of cultural analyst, though it does present an unorthodox system of balancing the scales. Anderson’s film would be ideally placed on a double bill with Darren Aronofsky’s recent, aggressively divisive and rather differently mesmerising Mother!, a far more chaotic study of a young woman put through the psychological wringer by the male creative ego. The two films are equally pointed in their characterisation of toxic men who cyclically consume women to feed and appease their internal insecurities – both even offer early glimpses of the outgoing muses about to be replaced.

But if Aronofsky’s film is unambiguously pessimistic about the ill-fated outcome of such partnerships, Phantom Thread subtly opens up possibilities for taming the beast. In a fractious political year that has seen many a film, from Get Out to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, take on intensified topicality, Anderson’s guarded, gilded object has somehow been released into its optimum moment: a time when the manifold forms of male-female abuse that enable art are being placed under the microscope, and any solutions are up for discussion.