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THE MASTER - REVIEW

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Over the years, Paul Thomas Anderson seems to have perfected his journey into tackling big themes through personal stories and through flawed, toxic characters. Case and point: The Master . Religion was a prominent theme in Anderson's previous effort There Will Be Blood and you could say that the whole film, despite outlining the rise and fall of Daniel Day Lewis' oil tycoon, was indeed about the relationship between business and religion. With his latest, we take a look at cults, yes, but also humanity in general. Here we have a Scientology-style organisation, "The Cause", based on the idea that Man is not an animal and, in fact, is far more important and deeper than he realizes and along comes Joaquin Phoenix's drifter, a down-and-out alcoholic drifter with a sex fixation. Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffmann), the cult's "master", decides to make him his pet-project, his guinea-pig. But it seems that proving the core theory that man isn