Phantom Thread (2017). Official promotional still courtesy Focus Features.
Alma butters her toast, and Reynolds Woodcock cannot bear the noise. He has work to do. She has breakfast to eat. In Phantom Thread, a table that ought to make room for two people becomes another place where Reynolds expects his preferences to govern the morning. Daniel Day-Lewis can make a complaint sound wounded long before it becomes openly cruel.
Paul Thomas Anderson sets the 2017 film in the fashion world of 1950s London. Reynolds and his sister Cyril, played by Lesley Manville, run the House of Woodcock through routines that everybody around them has learned to respect. Cyril can manage her brother because she knows the system and holds authority inside it. Alma, played by Vicky Krieps, arrives without that history. She wants a place in his life that gives her some say over how they spend it.
The scenes around food make their disagreement unusually concrete. A surprise dinner can become an intrusion. An attempt to please Reynolds can be dismissed because it came at the wrong time or disrupted the order he wanted. Krieps lets Alma watch him closely enough to understand how much of his apparent strength depends on everybody else accommodating it.
Her response becomes deliberately harmful. Poisoning makes him vulnerable and allows her to care for him, turning the balance of dependence in her favour. The ending makes the arrangement even more unsettling when he recognises what she is doing. Their intimacy has become entangled with a willingness to hurt and be hurt. The small argument over breakfast has grown into a negotiation over who gets to need whom.
Mark Bridges won the costume design Oscar for the film in 2018. The clothes give Reynolds's control an exquisite public form, with fittings, rules and people waiting for his approval. At home, Alma keeps insisting on an experience that will include her desires too. A spoon, a plate and the sound of a knife can tell us how little room she has been given, well before either of them says it directly.
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