His parables about cruel and powerful men have made him the most admired filmmaker alive, but they’ve had the side effect of making Paul Thomas Anderson seem a little down on the state of humanity. And he is! He definitely is. But, as he told Zach Baron on a sunny afternoon in the San Fernando Valley, his new movie, Phantom Thread—a romance about an uncompromising man who meets his comeuppance—gives away what he really believes: There just might be hope for us yet.

The film is set in the glamour of 1950’s post-war London, renowned dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock [Daniel Day-Lewis] and his sister Cyril [Lesley Manville] are at the center of British fashion, dressing royalty, movie stars, heiresses, socialites, debutants and dames with the distinct style of The House of Woodcock. Women come and go through Woodcock’s life, providing the confirmed bachelor with inspiration and companionship, until he comes across a young, strong-willed woman, Alma [Vicky Krieps], who soon becomes a fixture in his life as his muse and lover. Once controlled and planned, he finds his carefully tailored life disrupted by love.

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With this latest film, Paul Thomas Anderson paints an illuminating portrait both of an artist on a creative journey, and the women who keep his world running. Phantom Thread is Paul Thomas Anderson’s eighth movie and his second collaboration with Daniel Day-Lewis.

Though the film is set in 1955, Reynolds, in his posh and pampered upper-crust way, has the air of a highly contempo bachelor hedonist. The world is his oyster, and it’s also his man-cave.

"It is ultimately a romantic comedy of a particularly perverse persuasion, it glides and whispers, folding its most disturbing psychological ideas into a strangely tender spirit of seduction. Anderson tracks the courtship of Reynolds and Alma as a delicate, push-pull affair, each partner severely reactive to the other’s acts of charity or cruelty. Yet the fundamental glitch in their relationship is established as early as the first date. In one of the film’s most startling, grotesquely comic jabs, Reynolds takes Alma back to his place and has her undress – not, to both her and the audience’s bemusement, to make love to her, but to clinically take her measurements for a gown, with the sudden, business-like assistance of his Mrs Danvers-like sister Cyril. Reynolds wants a model and a muse before he wants a lover; he just can’t quite parse the difference", writes Guy Lodge for The Guardian.

Anderson, who didn’t just write and direct Phantom Thread but shot it himself (uncredited), stages the movie as a lavishly suspenseful piece of wealth porn. His camera travels up and down the stairways of the townhouse, and he lingers on Reynolds’ work as a designer, swathing us in the physicality of the fabrics — the 16th-century Flemish lace out of which he makes Alma a gorgeous lavender dress or a stunning royal silky number with pink diamonds on the breast.

Phantom Thread subtly opens up possibilities for taming the beast. In a fractious political year that has seen many a film, from Get Out to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, take on intensified topicality, Anderson’s guarded, gilded object has somehow been released into its optimum moment: a time when the manifold forms of male-female abuse that enable art are being placed under the microscope, and any solutions are up for discussion.

The film has performed impressively in its platform release with a projected $616,000 at four locations in its first eight days.