Phantom Thread

28/09/2025

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Homeopathic Feeling

Paul Thomas Anderson is often a director who doesn’t so much homage another director’s work but finds in it an undiscovered aspect that he makes his own. The risk in Boogie Nights (out of Martin Scorsese) and Magnolia (indebted to Robert Altman), rested on making films that were more virtuoso than the masters, and he might have become a figure like Brian De Palma, someone who made entertaining, impossibly well-crafted footnotes to Hitchcock. That might be a little too hard on De Palma, and would be far too hard on Anderson, but, with the possible exception of The Master, his work often brings to mind other directors. There Will Be Blood was heavily influenced by Kubrick, and The Phantom Thread shows the constant presence of Hitchcock.
Yet if we speak of an undiscovered or underdeveloped element in a director’s work, in Phantom Thread, it rests on a perversity Hitchcock often hinted at but wouldn’t quite make the central theme. In Vertigo, Scottie is finally more detective than pervert, even if the perversion is there throughout. In Rear Window, Jefferies hardly attends to his girlfriend when she is in the room but when he can see her through a long lens at an apartment across the way, he becomes fascinated beyond the predicament she puts herself in as she enters a murderer’s apartment. In Psycho, Hitchcock insists on couching a son’s obsession with his mother in murderous plot terms, rather than the degeneracy that is there nevertheless. Anderson homages the film about as directly as anyone could: an almost identical close-up of the central character spying through a small hole just as Norman Bates does in Psycho.
Anderson might have looked more closely, however, at a couple of Joan Fontaine Hitchcocks, Rebecca and Suspicion, with Alma (Vicky Krieps) the German waitress here who settles into fashion-designer Reynolds Woodcock’s (Daniel Day-Lewis) home, feels like a constant outsider, and is given to a little poisoning herself rather than threatened by its possibility. Yet while Hitchcock’s films were almost always strongly plotted so that the complexity of character could be contained by the rigour of the story, Anderson allows for the story to develop hardly at all so that the preciousness of Reynolds’ character, his milieu, and his work become spotlighted through the presence of a woman foreign to his world in almost every way. While Hitchcock films often explored exceptional circumstances that led to strong plotting (often mistaken identity, sometimes sudden murder), Anderson instead focuses on mundane circumstances and how difficult it is for Reynolds to accommodate anything that doesn’t fit into his habits and work rhythms. Early in the film and before he has yet to meet Alma, a present girlfriend says over breakfast that she can’t reach Reynolds and that there is no place for her any longer in his life. Reynolds very deliberately says he cannot have confrontations, he has no space for them, and he needs to deliver a dress that day. Shortly afterwards, the woman is gone, and the film proposes this is what Reynolds does. Takes a girlfriend, then freezes her out, and she is forced to leave. As Alma enters his life, very little changes, and even the early stage of their relationship fits into Reynold’s demands rather than Alma’s expectations. He initially dresses her rather than undresses her as he is keener to take her into his studio than into his bedroom, and speaks to her less as a lover than as a model. Things aren’t helped along when at the country retreat where he initially takes Alma, his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville), with whom he lives, arrives.
The film is partly about the rigidity of the English class system, but that wouldn’t be subject enough for the film, and if it had, there are probably others better placed to explore it than the Los Angeles native Anderson. He admitted he leaned strongly on Day-Lewis for this, someone whose father was of course poet laureate Sir Cecil Day-Lewis and his grandfather Sir Michael Balcon. As Anderson noted, ‘‘I was fascinated by the rules of the British class system. But I relied on Daniel to guide me in that area.’’ (BFI) However, the film has nothing to do with the UK’s fascination with class as pomp, circumstance and floggable entertainment for the international market. There are very few exterior shots, and we never quite work out the arrangement of the London house. Anderson avoids the typical establishing shots and lingering tracks and steadicams that in many a work remind us at every moment this is a luxury most cannot afford. Instead, what interests him is the claustrophobia of class, with Alma a breath of fresh air that nevertheless looks like it could leave her asphyxiated because of Reynolds' fixations and afflictions, his preoccupation with his late mother, and a perfectionism that might look a little too close to an inability to relinquish control. When Alma insists that she wants the house to herself, and sends away Cyril and the house servants as she cooks for him, he is disturbed by this intrusion into his habitual life. When he notes that the asparagus has been cooked not in olive oil with salt, but with butter, he becomes laughably accusatory. He tells her she knows how he likes it, and he can do no more than briefly feign gallantry at eating it at all. He goes on to wonder if she is ‘‘a special agent sent here to ruin my evening and possibly my life...do you have a gun...are you here to kill me.’’ These are funny lines, yet there is no humour in Reynolds as he offers them, nor is there quite simply a brutal and oppressive figure offering them either. When Alma says, ‘don’t act so tough. I know you are not’’, it has its echo later in the film when he and his sister argue. ‘‘Don’t pick a fight with me. You certainly won’t come out alive. I’d go right through you, and it would be you who ends up on the floor. Understood.’’ Reynolds has no reply, but looks at his Cyril sheepishly.
We will say more about the psychology at work in these scenes, and what they tell us about class and habit, but Anderson offers the two in slightly different registers. While they are both shot/counter shot, in the first it is visually confrontational, with the characters looking directly at each other as they talk, and the camera at a low angle on both of them. It gives the scene intensity, while the later one has a devastating chilliness. It cuts from Cyril in the foreground and Reynolds in the background, to Reynolds partially in the frame as we see Cyril in side elevation. As she makes her remarks looking ahead, this is less because she is afraid to look her brother in the eye; more that it reflects a fundamental impersonality that she has mastered better than he has. After all, she is the one who appears to have remained resolutely single. Reynolds may insist when he meets Alma that he is an incurable bachelor, but he has obviously had various assignations. He needs love as Cyril does not, or she at least has learned to live with its absence, just as it would appear that she has got over their mother’s death, as Reynolds hasn’t. She seems formally far more developed than Reynolds, and if this appears an odd way to sum up a character’s strengths, then that might be because the English class system the film presents suggests individuality matters little next to one’s place. Cyril knows her place very well. It is to be an important cog in the Woodcock fashion house, and she is well aware of what is expected of her and what she expects of others in the broader class system. When a couple of young women come over to a table where they are dining and one says that she hopes to wear one of Reynolds’ dresses in the future, he says he hopes her wish comes true. Moments later, as it looks like the lady and her friend are hanging around for a little too long, Cyril says. ‘‘thank you for your kind words. Good night.’’ Bouncers have evicted troublesome clients with less assertiveness.
When we proposed that Anderson often takes a director and finds a hidden theme that isn’t quite explored in the given director’s work, what he offers in Phantom Thread is a ‘Hitchcock film’ that make us wonder not whether Cary Grant is poisoning Joan Fontaine as in Suspicion, but why Alma chooses to do so in the first instance, and why Reynolds accepts it in the second. There is little plot here, and this is why, in contrast, Hitchcock was careful to show things from the potential poisonnee rather than the poisoner because this is where the suspense lies. Is he or isn’t he – is Grant a potential murderer, or is Fontaine clearly paranoid? If Anderson wanted story, he would have focused on Reynolds’ fears – after all Anderson makes them well evident when he wonders if Alma is a secret agent sent to ruin his life. This is perhaps not so far-fetched: the film is set in the fifties, this is less than ten years after the war: Reynolds would surely have fought in it in some capacity, and Alma’s accent is certainly Teutonic. These were also the early years of the Cold War, where spying for the other side wasn’t improbable. Hitchcock was drawn to both subjects (most especially and respectively in Notorious and North by Northwest), but Anderson chooses again to eschew making these possibilities plot points. Instead, we know that Alma wants to poison him, and discover too that Reynolds will accept it.
The question becomes not so much what will happen next, but what is between these two people. Krieps says ‘‘It’s about two strange creatures meeting and deeply recognising each other. In the end, it’s about the core of love and seeing one another. Suddenly you have this true connection to someone – it doesn’t matter how old you are, where you’re from, your class. It all blends out’’ (Britsh Vogue) That initial recognition might be deemed no more than love at first sight, but what is love at second sight like? Is this is where perversity can manifest itself, and the couple forms around their neuroses rather than their narcissism? Reynolds may seem to open up when he talks soon after meeting Alma about his mother, but there is a coyness in his confession that can appear, at the same time as registering grief, to be advertising sensitivity. Is this partly how he seduces a woman; just as central to that seduction is turning the woman into an object of couturial desire? Yet he promptly falls back into his professional and societal personality, the invulnerable, fussy, perfectionist control freak. After they first have sex, the next morning Alma comes down for breakfast, and Reynolds and Cyril are already sitting there. Happy and relaxed, she kisses Reynolds and receives no response as he is sketching away in his notepad. When she starts to eat, he disapproves of the movements she makes. ‘‘There is entirely too much movement at breakfast’’, he says, getting up and leaving the room. Later, she brings him tea while they are spending time at the Woodcocks’ county retreat. He asks her to remove the tray as she accepts he doesn’t want any tea. Reynolds still isn’t happy: ‘‘The tea is going out. The interruption is staying right here with me.’’ It is shortly after this we see Alma out picking mushrooms, and she says in the voiceover to the doctor (during a conversaton that frames the film) that when he is weakened in any way he becomes like a baby, very tender and open. If she needs to poison him a little so that she can induce this state, then so be it.
The film’s use of flashback revelation isn’t especially a Hitchcockian device, no matter if the English master used them, for example, in Rebecca, Spellbound and Stage Fright. But Phantom Thread also isn’t typical of genre that uses them frequently, film noir. The flashback here doesn’t reveal a femme fatale’s murderous and duplicitous motives, but only the perverse nature of their marriage. It is as if Alma understands as an outsider how to get inside Reynolds’ head. An aristocrat Reynolds dresses may complicitly propose to Reynolds that you never know what these foreigners are up to, as she says she doesn’t mean to be racist. But while she may understand how English society works, she doesn’t quite know how Reynolds functions. Only part of his personality is a product of this system, and in it he can come across as expert, brilliant, cruel, and witty. However, Alma can see through the system enough as someone from elsewhere, and so consequently can see through him. He might be weaker than Cyril, but he is also potentially more complex. It is this complexity Alma needs to comprehend, all the better so she can dis-able a personality propped up by class but incapable of feeling. Anderson might not pretend to know the intricacies of the English class system, but all he needs to know is that it isn’t conducive to intimacy and compassion, at least according to various ex-private school kids interviewed by the Guardian. ’I’ve yet to meet an ex-boarder who has found stable and healthy adult relationships easy or who hasn’t self-sabotaged another area of their life,’ one says. ‘’These schools historically set out to cauterise emotions and to break the child, to then shape the child.’’ Another says, ‘’the message enforced is simple: getting emotional won’t help, so don’t.’’ Of course, this is the Guardian, a left-wing paper, but one also that hasn’t been shy in hiring many who have been privately educated, and Private Eye once listed the schools they had been to. The paper might be left-leaning, but it is hardly ignorant of the subject. Some might even say it is even hypocritical over it. All we wish to note is that it wouldn’t be a surprise to hear Reynolds attended one such school, and his emotional limitations are a consequence of that education. Someone comes into his life from outside this system (just as Anderson does as he directs a film about it), and proposes a novel solution: a modest amount of poison, a kind of homeopathic cure for the emotionally maladjusted individual.
This leads us to the music: the often insistent musical accompaniment by Jonny Greenwood. Usually with a film’s score, we’re inclined to link it to the film’s theme, story or an individual character. But while Greenwood’s music reflects the film’s theme (dark romance), it also wants to capture its moment. Greenwood noted, ‘‘we looked at lots of English music from the ‘50s—however, lots of it was too ‘light.’ ‘’It was quite an optimistic time musically, with lots of pastoral, folk-influenced orchestral music—which didn’t really suit the film’s mood.’’ (Deadline) Greenwood decided to turn music that captures the period to music that captures Reynold’s mindset, and this makes for a much more claustrophobic film than one that would have been more concerned with period specifics, hence why it is and isn’t about class. It also captures the film’s gothic style (Rebecca again), but with the film haunted by Reynolds’ mother rather than the central character’s ex-wife.
Much of Alma and Reynolds's relationship seems hushed and private, a personal concern over a public display as Anderson insists the outward show of class must be secondary to the inward exploration of feeling. Though Alma may be seen modelling Reynolds’ dresses, she never quite comes out in London society, and the closest she has to a clear public moment is when she goes off on New Year’s Eve to a party Reynolds is reluctant to go to, and only turns up eventually to take her back home, hurt and perhaps a little jealous. Even when Alma is at the wedding of a wealthy client who marries a man who claims he isn’t interested in her money (and she gets uselessly drunk as if well aware that he wouldn’t be interested in her otherwise, as she had earlier talked about her ugliness), Alma sneaks into her room and removes the dress from her sozzled, sleeping body. It is a surreptitious moment that encroaches on a public event, as though Alma is always a figure of the shadows rather than the light.
She is meant to represent his intimate life, and the film’s purpose isn’t to show her place in society as Alma seems to have very little interest in having one, but her place next to Reynolds. If the film made more of her place in society, it might not have quite captured how important a figure she is next to him. For much of the film, Reynolds cannot see it, and during their argument over the asparagus meal, he says that if she doesn’t want to share his life, ‘’if she finds it so disagreeable, why doesn’t she just fuck off.’’ But little indicates that it has been a life they have been sharing. It has been one Alma has accepted, acknowledging this when she says all she has been doing has been waiting, waiting until he is ready to ask her to leave. This seems to have been the pattern with others' why should it be any different with her? Well, it turns out to be different because she poisons him, and it is the closest this perverse designer will probably ever get to being happy ever after. That ever after, might be the afterlife, as Alma admits to the doctor that he might die, but if so, she will be back waiting again. She will be ready to join him at a later date, and yet hardly be subordinate to his wishes.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Phantom Thread

Homeopathic Feeling

Paul Thomas Anderson is often a director who doesn’t so much homage another director’s work but finds in it an undiscovered aspect that he makes his own. The risk in Boogie Nights (out of Martin Scorsese) and Magnolia (indebted to Robert Altman), rested on making films that were more virtuoso than the masters, and he might have become a figure like Brian De Palma, someone who made entertaining, impossibly well-crafted footnotes to Hitchcock. That might be a little too hard on De Palma, and would be far too hard on Anderson, but, with the possible exception of The Master, his work often brings to mind other directors. There Will Be Blood was heavily influenced by Kubrick, and The Phantom Thread shows the constant presence of Hitchcock.
Yet if we speak of an undiscovered or underdeveloped element in a director’s work, in Phantom Thread, it rests on a perversity Hitchcock often hinted at but wouldn’t quite make the central theme. In Vertigo, Scottie is finally more detective than pervert, even if the perversion is there throughout. In Rear Window, Jefferies hardly attends to his girlfriend when she is in the room but when he can see her through a long lens at an apartment across the way, he becomes fascinated beyond the predicament she puts herself in as she enters a murderer’s apartment. In Psycho, Hitchcock insists on couching a son’s obsession with his mother in murderous plot terms, rather than the degeneracy that is there nevertheless. Anderson homages the film about as directly as anyone could: an almost identical close-up of the central character spying through a small hole just as Norman Bates does in Psycho.
Anderson might have looked more closely, however, at a couple of Joan Fontaine Hitchcocks, Rebecca and Suspicion, with Alma (Vicky Krieps) the German waitress here who settles into fashion-designer Reynolds Woodcock’s (Daniel Day-Lewis) home, feels like a constant outsider, and is given to a little poisoning herself rather than threatened by its possibility. Yet while Hitchcock’s films were almost always strongly plotted so that the complexity of character could be contained by the rigour of the story, Anderson allows for the story to develop hardly at all so that the preciousness of Reynolds’ character, his milieu, and his work become spotlighted through the presence of a woman foreign to his world in almost every way. While Hitchcock films often explored exceptional circumstances that led to strong plotting (often mistaken identity, sometimes sudden murder), Anderson instead focuses on mundane circumstances and how difficult it is for Reynolds to accommodate anything that doesn’t fit into his habits and work rhythms. Early in the film and before he has yet to meet Alma, a present girlfriend says over breakfast that she can’t reach Reynolds and that there is no place for her any longer in his life. Reynolds very deliberately says he cannot have confrontations, he has no space for them, and he needs to deliver a dress that day. Shortly afterwards, the woman is gone, and the film proposes this is what Reynolds does. Takes a girlfriend, then freezes her out, and she is forced to leave. As Alma enters his life, very little changes, and even the early stage of their relationship fits into Reynold’s demands rather than Alma’s expectations. He initially dresses her rather than undresses her as he is keener to take her into his studio than into his bedroom, and speaks to her less as a lover than as a model. Things aren’t helped along when at the country retreat where he initially takes Alma, his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville), with whom he lives, arrives.
The film is partly about the rigidity of the English class system, but that wouldn’t be subject enough for the film, and if it had, there are probably others better placed to explore it than the Los Angeles native Anderson. He admitted he leaned strongly on Day-Lewis for this, someone whose father was of course poet laureate Sir Cecil Day-Lewis and his grandfather Sir Michael Balcon. As Anderson noted, ‘‘I was fascinated by the rules of the British class system. But I relied on Daniel to guide me in that area.’’ (BFI) However, the film has nothing to do with the UK’s fascination with class as pomp, circumstance and floggable entertainment for the international market. There are very few exterior shots, and we never quite work out the arrangement of the London house. Anderson avoids the typical establishing shots and lingering tracks and steadicams that in many a work remind us at every moment this is a luxury most cannot afford. Instead, what interests him is the claustrophobia of class, with Alma a breath of fresh air that nevertheless looks like it could leave her asphyxiated because of Reynolds' fixations and afflictions, his preoccupation with his late mother, and a perfectionism that might look a little too close to an inability to relinquish control. When Alma insists that she wants the house to herself, and sends away Cyril and the house servants as she cooks for him, he is disturbed by this intrusion into his habitual life. When he notes that the asparagus has been cooked not in olive oil with salt, but with butter, he becomes laughably accusatory. He tells her she knows how he likes it, and he can do no more than briefly feign gallantry at eating it at all. He goes on to wonder if she is ‘‘a special agent sent here to ruin my evening and possibly my life...do you have a gun...are you here to kill me.’’ These are funny lines, yet there is no humour in Reynolds as he offers them, nor is there quite simply a brutal and oppressive figure offering them either. When Alma says, ‘don’t act so tough. I know you are not’’, it has its echo later in the film when he and his sister argue. ‘‘Don’t pick a fight with me. You certainly won’t come out alive. I’d go right through you, and it would be you who ends up on the floor. Understood.’’ Reynolds has no reply, but looks at his Cyril sheepishly.
We will say more about the psychology at work in these scenes, and what they tell us about class and habit, but Anderson offers the two in slightly different registers. While they are both shot/counter shot, in the first it is visually confrontational, with the characters looking directly at each other as they talk, and the camera at a low angle on both of them. It gives the scene intensity, while the later one has a devastating chilliness. It cuts from Cyril in the foreground and Reynolds in the background, to Reynolds partially in the frame as we see Cyril in side elevation. As she makes her remarks looking ahead, this is less because she is afraid to look her brother in the eye; more that it reflects a fundamental impersonality that she has mastered better than he has. After all, she is the one who appears to have remained resolutely single. Reynolds may insist when he meets Alma that he is an incurable bachelor, but he has obviously had various assignations. He needs love as Cyril does not, or she at least has learned to live with its absence, just as it would appear that she has got over their mother’s death, as Reynolds hasn’t. She seems formally far more developed than Reynolds, and if this appears an odd way to sum up a character’s strengths, then that might be because the English class system the film presents suggests individuality matters little next to one’s place. Cyril knows her place very well. It is to be an important cog in the Woodcock fashion house, and she is well aware of what is expected of her and what she expects of others in the broader class system. When a couple of young women come over to a table where they are dining and one says that she hopes to wear one of Reynolds’ dresses in the future, he says he hopes her wish comes true. Moments later, as it looks like the lady and her friend are hanging around for a little too long, Cyril says. ‘‘thank you for your kind words. Good night.’’ Bouncers have evicted troublesome clients with less assertiveness.
When we proposed that Anderson often takes a director and finds a hidden theme that isn’t quite explored in the given director’s work, what he offers in Phantom Thread is a ‘Hitchcock film’ that make us wonder not whether Cary Grant is poisoning Joan Fontaine as in Suspicion, but why Alma chooses to do so in the first instance, and why Reynolds accepts it in the second. There is little plot here, and this is why, in contrast, Hitchcock was careful to show things from the potential poisonnee rather than the poisoner because this is where the suspense lies. Is he or isn’t he – is Grant a potential murderer, or is Fontaine clearly paranoid? If Anderson wanted story, he would have focused on Reynolds’ fears – after all Anderson makes them well evident when he wonders if Alma is a secret agent sent to ruin his life. This is perhaps not so far-fetched: the film is set in the fifties, this is less than ten years after the war: Reynolds would surely have fought in it in some capacity, and Alma’s accent is certainly Teutonic. These were also the early years of the Cold War, where spying for the other side wasn’t improbable. Hitchcock was drawn to both subjects (most especially and respectively in Notorious and North by Northwest), but Anderson chooses again to eschew making these possibilities plot points. Instead, we know that Alma wants to poison him, and discover too that Reynolds will accept it.
The question becomes not so much what will happen next, but what is between these two people. Krieps says ‘‘It’s about two strange creatures meeting and deeply recognising each other. In the end, it’s about the core of love and seeing one another. Suddenly you have this true connection to someone – it doesn’t matter how old you are, where you’re from, your class. It all blends out’’ (Britsh Vogue) That initial recognition might be deemed no more than love at first sight, but what is love at second sight like? Is this is where perversity can manifest itself, and the couple forms around their neuroses rather than their narcissism? Reynolds may seem to open up when he talks soon after meeting Alma about his mother, but there is a coyness in his confession that can appear, at the same time as registering grief, to be advertising sensitivity. Is this partly how he seduces a woman; just as central to that seduction is turning the woman into an object of couturial desire? Yet he promptly falls back into his professional and societal personality, the invulnerable, fussy, perfectionist control freak. After they first have sex, the next morning Alma comes down for breakfast, and Reynolds and Cyril are already sitting there. Happy and relaxed, she kisses Reynolds and receives no response as he is sketching away in his notepad. When she starts to eat, he disapproves of the movements she makes. ‘‘There is entirely too much movement at breakfast’’, he says, getting up and leaving the room. Later, she brings him tea while they are spending time at the Woodcocks’ county retreat. He asks her to remove the tray as she accepts he doesn’t want any tea. Reynolds still isn’t happy: ‘‘The tea is going out. The interruption is staying right here with me.’’ It is shortly after this we see Alma out picking mushrooms, and she says in the voiceover to the doctor (during a conversaton that frames the film) that when he is weakened in any way he becomes like a baby, very tender and open. If she needs to poison him a little so that she can induce this state, then so be it.
The film’s use of flashback revelation isn’t especially a Hitchcockian device, no matter if the English master used them, for example, in Rebecca, Spellbound and Stage Fright. But Phantom Thread also isn’t typical of genre that uses them frequently, film noir. The flashback here doesn’t reveal a femme fatale’s murderous and duplicitous motives, but only the perverse nature of their marriage. It is as if Alma understands as an outsider how to get inside Reynolds’ head. An aristocrat Reynolds dresses may complicitly propose to Reynolds that you never know what these foreigners are up to, as she says she doesn’t mean to be racist. But while she may understand how English society works, she doesn’t quite know how Reynolds functions. Only part of his personality is a product of this system, and in it he can come across as expert, brilliant, cruel, and witty. However, Alma can see through the system enough as someone from elsewhere, and so consequently can see through him. He might be weaker than Cyril, but he is also potentially more complex. It is this complexity Alma needs to comprehend, all the better so she can dis-able a personality propped up by class but incapable of feeling. Anderson might not pretend to know the intricacies of the English class system, but all he needs to know is that it isn’t conducive to intimacy and compassion, at least according to various ex-private school kids interviewed by the Guardian. ’I’ve yet to meet an ex-boarder who has found stable and healthy adult relationships easy or who hasn’t self-sabotaged another area of their life,’ one says. ‘’These schools historically set out to cauterise emotions and to break the child, to then shape the child.’’ Another says, ‘’the message enforced is simple: getting emotional won’t help, so don’t.’’ Of course, this is the Guardian, a left-wing paper, but one also that hasn’t been shy in hiring many who have been privately educated, and Private Eye once listed the schools they had been to. The paper might be left-leaning, but it is hardly ignorant of the subject. Some might even say it is even hypocritical over it. All we wish to note is that it wouldn’t be a surprise to hear Reynolds attended one such school, and his emotional limitations are a consequence of that education. Someone comes into his life from outside this system (just as Anderson does as he directs a film about it), and proposes a novel solution: a modest amount of poison, a kind of homeopathic cure for the emotionally maladjusted individual.
This leads us to the music: the often insistent musical accompaniment by Jonny Greenwood. Usually with a film’s score, we’re inclined to link it to the film’s theme, story or an individual character. But while Greenwood’s music reflects the film’s theme (dark romance), it also wants to capture its moment. Greenwood noted, ‘‘we looked at lots of English music from the ‘50s—however, lots of it was too ‘light.’ ‘’It was quite an optimistic time musically, with lots of pastoral, folk-influenced orchestral music—which didn’t really suit the film’s mood.’’ (Deadline) Greenwood decided to turn music that captures the period to music that captures Reynold’s mindset, and this makes for a much more claustrophobic film than one that would have been more concerned with period specifics, hence why it is and isn’t about class. It also captures the film’s gothic style (Rebecca again), but with the film haunted by Reynolds’ mother rather than the central character’s ex-wife.
Much of Alma and Reynolds's relationship seems hushed and private, a personal concern over a public display as Anderson insists the outward show of class must be secondary to the inward exploration of feeling. Though Alma may be seen modelling Reynolds’ dresses, she never quite comes out in London society, and the closest she has to a clear public moment is when she goes off on New Year’s Eve to a party Reynolds is reluctant to go to, and only turns up eventually to take her back home, hurt and perhaps a little jealous. Even when Alma is at the wedding of a wealthy client who marries a man who claims he isn’t interested in her money (and she gets uselessly drunk as if well aware that he wouldn’t be interested in her otherwise, as she had earlier talked about her ugliness), Alma sneaks into her room and removes the dress from her sozzled, sleeping body. It is a surreptitious moment that encroaches on a public event, as though Alma is always a figure of the shadows rather than the light.
She is meant to represent his intimate life, and the film’s purpose isn’t to show her place in society as Alma seems to have very little interest in having one, but her place next to Reynolds. If the film made more of her place in society, it might not have quite captured how important a figure she is next to him. For much of the film, Reynolds cannot see it, and during their argument over the asparagus meal, he says that if she doesn’t want to share his life, ‘’if she finds it so disagreeable, why doesn’t she just fuck off.’’ But little indicates that it has been a life they have been sharing. It has been one Alma has accepted, acknowledging this when she says all she has been doing has been waiting, waiting until he is ready to ask her to leave. This seems to have been the pattern with others' why should it be any different with her? Well, it turns out to be different because she poisons him, and it is the closest this perverse designer will probably ever get to being happy ever after. That ever after, might be the afterlife, as Alma admits to the doctor that he might die, but if so, she will be back waiting again. She will be ready to join him at a later date, and yet hardly be subordinate to his wishes.

© Tony McKibbin