Thread-slingers with an addiction to YouTube tutorials (like me) may have seen an amusing film by seamstress/historian Bernadette Banner in which she reacts to a bunch of films that feature actors sewing, or at least pretending to sew. Examples include How the Grinch Stole Christmas (not convincing) to The Phantom Thread (mostly bang on, featuring real dressmakers at work). Each one is picked apart with waspish scrutiny by Banner, who can spot the difference between a vintage treadle-operated chain stitch machine and a lockstitch machine from different periods in the 19th-century. Hopefully Banner will get a chance to scrutinise this loosely sewing-themed thriller and nitpick its faux pas, such as the bit where the seamstress protagonist Barbara (Eve Connolly) seems to sew a button on a client’s wedding dress in less than a minute. (No thread shank? Shocking!)
