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Bodies are shown having sex for over three minutes. The woman gets bored and weary. Time is dilated, suspended. Lulu is a female croupier in a Los Angeles casino. Living alone, she is a beautiful and angry woman. Nitzan, Lulu's younger sister, is in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Shot mainly in the City of Los Angels, Phantom Love is constructed like a set of Russian dolls, each scene giving rise to another within it. As in all of Nina Menkes' work, the film features a character alienated by an inhospitable and hostile environment, here, that of the family, where exterior violence echoes internal violence in a claustrophobic play of mirror images. When her sister invades the private space she so tightly controls, it is like electro-shock for Lulu, who has no choice but to begin to change.

Nina Menkes, a leading figure in the American underground cinema, studied film at UCLA and became adept at low-budget filmmaking. Often working with Tinka, her sister, she has invented a cinematic language of her own to convey her point of view in an almost exclusively male milieu. Her films have shown in international film festivals including Toronto, Rotterdam, Sundance, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2007 Nina Menkes was honored with a retrospective program of her films, at the Viennale Film Festival.