Review of Phantom Thread (2017) by Hellacritical — 17 Feb 2018

This film could easily be misconstrued as a comedy. The lines were so stiff and unnatural that they became humorous. There is also way too much staring. I'm pretty sure about an hour and 5 minutes of the movie could have been shaved off if the characters just stopped staring at each other and pausing before they spoke. Don't get me wrong, that can be sometimes powerful, but it was not at all utilized correctly in this film. It doesn't work when literally every character does it.

The whole film is a demonstration of insanely toxic masculinity. For some reason, Vicky Krieps' character, Alma, finds this insanely attractive. It isn't until she meets Daniel Day-Lewis' character that she starts to feel good about herself. It's insanely offensive, and she is definitely no one's feminist role model. The fact that people are calling this a "love story" is disgusting.

None of the characters were likable so I found the whole thing quite boring. It is difficult to pinpoint what parts I hated exactly, because they were all equally forgettable. Paul Thomas Anderson's characters had no personalities whatsoever. They were "quirky" and "strange," but that's not a personality.

I understand that this is supposed to be a haunting, semi-psychopathic film, but the way to really make that work is to make it as close to real-life as possible. Making it seem like it could happen in real life makes it truly scary. However, this did not seem like real life to me, because everything was just so flat. The dialogue was unnatural and disappointing.

The two reasons that I'm giving this even a 3 is because the cinematography and the costume design was beautiful. I really wish that more was done with the clothing aspect. The story had so much potential, and I kept thinking of ways that the movie could have been so much better, but alas, PTA did not take that route.

Overall, incredibly disappointing. Because of the poor quality of this film, I hope this isn't actually Daniel Day-Lewis' final film, for his sake.