I really wanted to like this movie. There Will Be Blood is one of my favorite movies and this reunites Paul Thomas Anderson with Daniel Day Lewis. I did enjoy the first half, studying the interesting, quirky main character and his apparent meet cute with a waitress. I struggled to connect to the second half of the film. Maybe I expected her to be his muse. And maybe she is, just not in the way I expected.

Maybe it’s because I loath being sick. Maybe I just didn’t understand why or believe that Reynolds Woodcock would intentionally get sick.

From a Vulture Interview with PTA:
“I’ve heard that one of the key inspirations for Phantom Thread came when you got sick. You were in bed, and your wife looked at you with such sudden tenderness, now that you had been brought low and she was in charge. 
It’s a slight exaggeration, but not too far from the truth, and a helpful way for me to remember one of the beginnings of the idea. But it also is about just what it means to slow down. Do you ever have trouble slowing down?”

So he purposefully eats the poisoned omelette because he wants to feel tenderness? Or be slowed down by the illness?

The only theory that works for me relates to his mother. During his first bout of mushroom poisoning, he sees his mother. Early in the film, we learn that Woodcock hides secrets and messages into the linings of his garments. He wears a lock of his mother’s hair over his heart in his garments. He tries to never be without her. Does he wish to be poisoned again and again in the hopes that he can visit with his mother?

When Woodcock proposes marriage to Alma, he says she can help “to keep my sour heart from choking. To break a curse.” He stitches “Not Cursed” into this most important wedding gown. Is that his biggest wish? To not be cursed?