Film Review: "Phantom Thread" by Paul Thomas Anderson

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

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This movie has a simple story that hides its main knot under a thin veneer. The pleasure the audience will get from it will depend on whether they catch the clues. The quick rundown of the plot is that a dressmaker—who is excessively attached to his late mother and who lives with his sister and who acts spoiled and petulant—has an affair with a woman named Alma.

The four details in the movie the audience must catch are these: 1) The dressmaker says that he can and does hide all sorts of things in the dresses he makes. 2) He made his mother’s wedding dress for her second marriage. 3) He puts “never cursed” into the wedding dress he makes for the Belgian princess. 4) He numbers “to break a curse” among his reasons why he is proposing to Alma.

Like Hamlet, he was upset at this mother remarrying after his father died, and cursed her or her marriage, and guilty for the rest of his life, and believes he is haunted by his mother’s ghost, who makes an appearence almost nude except her wedding dress. His curse also cursed himself thereby and he remained arrested in his immaturity, never grew out of it.

Because he is unable to become a man and husband even after he marries, he must regress into being a child, and his wife becomes a sort of Munchausen by proxy mother that keeps her child sick.

Out of 10 score: Light to decent 7. Among Paul Thomas Anderson’s weaker movies.