After eight years away from the screen, Daniel Day-Lewis returns in his son Ronan’s debut feature, a project he admits would have haunted him if he had refused. The film is a psychological wilderness drama that leans more on the father-son duo’s strengths than on the need to truly tell a story.
Co-written by both, the story follows two estranged brothers, Ray (Day-Lewis) and Jem (Sean Bean), whose violent past forced them into different paths. Jem embraced rigid faith and family, while Ray cut himself off from the world. When Jem’s teenage son is involved in an incident, he turns to Ray for help, forcing a reckoning with their shared history of religious repression, abuse, and the scars left from their time as soldiers during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
The film unfolds less as a narrative than as a showcase. Daniel has two centerpiece monologues, which he also co-wrote, and Ronan frames them with painterly imagery that reflects his background in art. The script feels built to arrive at these displays without urgency or meaning, leaving them as isolated set pieces. There is no doubt Daniel Day-Lewis is one of cinema’s greats, and his return after such a long hiatus would have been enough to get any project approved. Yet Anemone often feels like a vanity project, designed more to serve him than to tell a story. His monologues are predictably great, recalling the dry humor and fury of Gangs of New York in the first and the heavy despair of There Will Be Blood in the second. The second in particular is a masterclass, with the actor peeling away layers of protection and exposing vulnerability for the first time. Both speeches are gripping, yet also calculated, more like a greatest-hits reel than giving the actor something truly new to work with.
Ronan, meanwhile, uses the project as a canvas for his own artwork, repurposing elements from past paintings. A surreal, or as he prefers hyperreal, creature appears as a symbol of Ray’s turmoil. It is strikingly rendered but plays more like a gallery piece dropped into the middle of the film than an organic part of the story. Storm-battered landscapes and painterly compositions underline his background, giving Anemone its visual identity, though they rarely build into a cohesive whole.
Between these showcases the film struggles to sustain interest. The supporting cast is largely passive. Bean spends most of his time listening, though his face has enough intensity to make that watchable. Samantha Morton and Samuel Bottomley share one well-acted conversation, but it does not move the story forward, and it is hard to believe such exchanges would wait two decades to surface. There are moments that work, such as the handling of the brothers’ first encounter, but the son’s storyline never carries weight, and without it the central conflict (whether Ray will return or not) never gathers attention. Opening the film with the son’s incident might have given it more urgency.
What remains is a collection of impressive elements that rarely cohere: Day-Lewis’s commanding return, Ben Fordesman’s moody cinematography, Bobby Krlic’s shoegaze-inflected score, and immersive sound design. Even the carefully detailed hut, filled with objects chosen by Day-Lewis himself, reinforces how much the project exists to serve his presence. There are clear influences from Lynne Ramsay, whose Morvern Callar inspired Ronan to cast Morton, but where Ramsay makes the crescendo itself fascinating, Ronan builds with a deliberate meander, letting only the destination matter. Anemone can be intense, but it is rarely engaging. The monologues are loud, the images striking, yet the emotions never quite land.