Phantom Thread: Daniel Day-Lewis bows out in style with drama of delicious pleasure

Phantom Thread is a 2017 American perioddrama film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, set in the haute coutureworld of London in the 1950s. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis as a couturier who takes a young waitress, played by Vicky Krieps, as his muse; it is Day-Lewis’s final role before his retirement. The film is the first Anderson film shot outside the United States, with principal photography beginning in January 2017 in Lythe, England.

It is Anderson’s second collaboration with Day-Lewis, following There Will Be Blood (2007), and his fourth with composer Jonny Greenwood. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 91% based on 317 reviews, and an average rating of 8.47/10. The website’s critical consensus reads, “Phantom Thread’s finely woven narrative is filled out nicely by humor, intoxicating romantic tension, and yet another impressively committed performance from Daniel Day-Lewis.”

On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 90 out of 100, based on 51 critics, indicating “universal acclaim.” The A.V. Club’s A. A. Dowd gave the film an A−, calling it a “charitable and even poignantly hopeful take on the subject [of being in a relationship with an artist]” and said that “in the simple, refined timelessness of its technique, Phantom Thread is practically a love letter to classic aesthetic values—cinematic, sartorial, or otherwise.”

Observer critic Mark Kermode gave the film five stars, describing it as “a deftly spun yarn,” and praised Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance, calling his role as a “perfect fit [in a] beautifully realised tale of 50s haute couture.” Christy Lemire of the LAFCA placed the film second on her list of ten best films of 2017, describing it as “captivating” and “one of Paul Thomas Anderson’s absolute best,” as well as singling out Jonny Greenwood’s score as “intoxicating.”