A few loose seams

CRAFTWORK OF PHANTOM THREAD IS UNPARALLELED, BUT THE STORY DOESN’T QUITE HAVE THE DEPTH

‘If you want to have a staring contest with me you will lose.”

So says Alma (Vicky Krieps), a tea shop waitress from nowhere, to her new patron and paramour, a famous designer played by Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread. But it’s also what the movies would say to us if they could really talk. This is cinema that dares you to look away, lest you miss some subtle nuance in its elegant design.

The designer is P.T. Anderson (Paul Thomas, not Phantom Thread), whose every-few-years oeuvre includes Inherent Vice, The Master, There Will Be Blood and Punch-Drunk Love. This might be his smallest movie in terms of setting; it mostly takes place in the home of dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock, which is also his workshop and showroom.

From the beginning, the movie is all about stares and sidelong looks and glances that can be avoided or returned. Part of that has to do with the industry in which Reynolds works; fashion is meant to be seen, and at one point we see that he’s installed a peephole in the models’ dressing room, not to look in lasciviously, but to peer out at the runway, and the audience.

The movie takes its time announcing itself, which will cause the cinema audience to lean in all the more. For instance, who is Cyril (played by Lesley Manville), Reynolds’ right-hand woman? Wife? Secretary? He calls her “my old so-and-so,” and she is clearly the gatekeeper to all things in his life, including his deepening romance with Alma. (I’ve since read that Cyril is his sister, but I don’t remember the film telling me that directly.)

Her long-standing place at Reynolds’ side, and Alma’s increasing influence on him, sets up a power struggle that you just know is going to end badly for someone. (Although it’s worth noting that the triangle is the strongest shape, able to take great pressure from any side without buckling.)

Alma is swept up into Reynolds’ life, seemingly at random. He likes the look of her when she waits on him at a small restaurant, and takes her out to dinner, and then home to measure and fit her, which for this fussy bachelor functions as foreplay. Sex comes much later, to the point where we’re wondering if it will come at all, and isn’t that the sweetest uncertainty?

All of which is to say that Phantom Thread is a slow and stately yet sensual movie, with a sweeping score from Jonny Greenwood (Anderson’s go-to composer), and sound design that mimics the atmosphere; when Reynolds is in a tetchy mood at the breakfast table, Alma’s buttering and eating of a square of toast is made to sound like a horse has just galloped across the table.

I have many nice things to say about Phantom Thread, but in the end the story didn’t quite have the depth to hold my attention. Devotees of Anderson’s work are loving this one, but I wasn’t taken with either Inherent Vice or The Master, even though the craftwork in both is unparalleled.

And here too there are moments of sublime beauty, and dialogue sharp as a tailor’s shears. When Alma has disturbed Reynolds at his tea and offers to leave and let him get on with it, he’s unappeased: “The tea is going on,” he says. “The interruption is staying right here with me.” But I’m also willing to admit I may have missed something in my first and only viewing; if ever there were a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it movie, this is it.

Phantom Thread opens Jan. 5 in Toronto; Jan. 12 in Montreal and Vancouver; and across Canada on Jan. 19.

LAURIE SPARHAM / FOCUS FEATURES VIA THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Vicky Krieps as Alma and Daniel Day-Lewis as Reynolds Woodcock in P.T. Anderson’s Phantom Thread.