Film review: Phantom Thread

When I heard Daniel Day-Lewis had done a movie about sewing, my Oscar-bait senses lit up like a switchboard. No movie has been so clearly directed at the Academy since Eddie Redmayne dressed as a trans-woman for whatever that movie was called.

Phantom Thread tells the story of Reynolds Woodcock (Day-Lewis), a couturier (someone who sews) who falls in love with a waitress played by Vicky Krieps.

Look, I’ll freely admit this stuff isn’t for me. This type of hoity-toity film-making that drips with sophistication and self-celebration is want to send me to a bored state of sleepy torpor faster than you can say, Paul Thomas Anderson.

However, the performances are obviously great. Day-Lewis isn’t going to drop the ball on his last outing. The rest of the cast is filled with people who, I imagine, absolutely blew everyone away with their various King Lears in the West End.

Aside from that, I couldn’t find anything to get excited about. The settings and framing are as monochrome as the skin colour of its cast. The story is about a woman staying with a man who’s a huge tool. None of the characters are particularly sympathetic or likeable. The whole film is laced (get it?) with an incessant tinkling piano score I found extremely irritating. If there’s no piano, its usually because its a completely silent scene which seems to last five years each. I understand that it’s probably incredibly clever and I’m just a proletariat dullard with no taste but I don’t care. If you want me to look deeper into it, you have to make me interested to do so first.

Again, it’s not for me. That’s not to say someone who loves high art cinema won’t find a lot to love in this. But ultimately, you can’t convince me that a film is amazing just because the film itself is convinced it is. If you want to watch a movie where a woman stays with an abusive maniac, just go see 50 shades. At least in that, the boredom is punctuated by occasional sex. Plus its 25 minutes shorter.