It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to The Next Picture Show, a movie The Week podcast devoted to a classic film in the way it shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Keith Phipps here again with...

Genevieve Kosky.

Scott Tobias.

And Tasha Robinson.

On the first half of this episode, we discussed Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, the 1940 film that brought him to America, earned a Best Picture Oscar, began a difficult relationship with David O'Sullsnik, and assured that any movies with creepy maids would forever be compared to it.

In this episode, we'll turn our attention to Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread,

which doesn't have a creepy maid, but it does have a Mrs. Danvers-like figure in the former

Leslie Manville's Cyril Woodcock, sister of its central character, Reynolds Woodcock. In fact,

Anderson has freely cited Rebecca as a direct influence on Phantom Thread, suggesting to

Entertainment Weekly that he would be next in the line of directors who tried and failed, his

words, to make their own version of their movie. Yet, for all their connections, which we'll

get into shortly, Fanon Thread is very much its own movie, and very much the unmistakable work of Paul Thomas Anderson. Power struggles, in one form another, have been central to many of Anderson's films. And here, the interest gets channeled into a story that finds the unexpected middle ground between The Master and Punch Drunk Love. It's a love story that takes more than a few unexpected turns, and one fraught with a hard-to-define tension. In a recent Q&A on Reddit, Anderson answered a question about depicting romantic love with a reference to, yes, Alfred Hitchcock, responding, quote, I think Hitchcock had a good idea. He said, shoot love scenes like murder scenes and murder scenes like love scenes. Maybe he felt that falling in love as scary as shit. I think we've all felt that way. By that logic, there are a lot of murder scenes and phantom thread, even if it's not clear who's killing whom. We meet Reynolds Woodcock, played by Daniel DeLewis, the highly successful and extremely particular dress designer, as he's in the process of discarding, with the help of his sister Cyril, played by Leslie Manville, the latest in what seems to be a series of lovers and muses. He soon finds another

in Alma, played by Vicky Creeps, a waitress of unknown origin with no apparent attachments,

and eventually no apparent interest beyond keeping Reynolds happy. But it's not that simple.

Trying to change the unspoken terms of the relationship

leads to potential disaster. Instead, she discovers that if she also doesn't want to end up on a list

of former inspirations, she's going to have to take more radical steps. But as Alma and Reynolds

circle one another, sometimes drawing each other closer, other times pushing each other away,

...