Call it Fifty Shades of Daniel Day

Phantom Thread 15 cert, 130 min

Dir Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring Daniel Day-lewis, Vicky Krieps, Lesley Manville, Camilla Rutherford, Harriet Sansom Harris, Brian Gleeson, Gina Mckee, Julia Davis

Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-lewis) is an internationally renowned couturier working in Fifties London, and a kind of gigolo with scissors. When a woman tries on a gown in his studio, it’s as if it has her clasped in a dance hold, and is about to sweep her off her feet.

A little later, we watch him sizing up a model, while his sister and lifelong assistant Cyril (Lesley Manville) jots down the particulars. “You have no breasts,” he coolly observes. “I know, I’m sorry,” the girl replies. “No, no, you’re perfect,” he says. “It’s my job to give you some.” Then: “If I choose to.”

Welcome to the sly, exquisite world of Phantom Thread: the new film from Paul Thomas Anderson, and perhaps also the last that Day-lewis, who announced his retirement last year, will ever make.

Watching Day-lewis unfasten Woodcock’s psychological nooks and hatches is like watching him dismantle the apparatus of his craft. A scene in which Reynolds orders breakfast feels as freighted with significance as a Shakespearean soliloquy. Plenty of actors have given us Hamlets for the ages, but only Day-lewis can make you gasp at the word “sausages”.

Of course Reynolds isn’t merely ordering breakfast: his eye has been caught by the waitress, Alma (Vicky Krieps). Anderson leaves Woodcock’s exact reasoning behind his attraction opaque: you and I don’t see the world as Reynolds does.

Soon enough, Reynolds has whisked Alma back to live at his town house atelier. Anderson shoots the House of Woodcock with reverence but also a wink, tracking Reynolds’s middle-aged women assistants as they file up the stairwell towards the higher floors, where genius resides.

The mood is so fragile, even a mistimed pot of tea can knock the mood askew, and Krieps’s Alma proves a destabilising force. When Reynolds is being capital G Great and capital D Difficult, she stands her ground. The tug of dominance and submission between the two of them – call it Fifty Shades of Daniel Day – is kinky and intense. In this Hitchcockian gothic romance, the arrangement the couple snake their way around to will, I suspect, split Anderson’s audience down the middle. Some will think it an insane and self-defeating compromise; others as true love. And everyone, wonderfully, will be right.