It’s not easy having a legend for a dad.
Though, to be cynical, it probably helps in getting a film made.
Anemone is Ronan Day-Lewis’s first film, co-written with his father Daniel Day-Lewis, who also stars — returning to the screen after eight years.
Sean Bean plays Jem, a man who heads into the woods to find his brother Ray (Day-Lewis), an ex-soldier turned hermit. Ray’s son Brian (Samuel Bottomley) has committed an act of violence, seemingly rooted in unanswered questions about his absent father. Jem thinks the only way to resolve the family’s trauma is to bring Ray home — though why they can’t just bring Brian to him is never explained.
But Anemone isn’t a film much concerned with logic, or with anything apart from Ray. When Ray isn’t onscreen, everyone is talking about him: what kind of man he was, why he vanished into the woods twenty years ago. When he is onscreen, he fills the silence. Jem asks simple questions, Ray either glares or snaps, Jem shuts up. Then Jem mutters “bless you, brother.” Then Ray says “fuck off.” It’s an entire relationship built on ellipses and hostility.
There’s a meta component too, of course: Day-Lewis’s own return to the screen, after a public retreat, playing a man who’s done the same. The parallels are impossible to ignore, but the film itself is merely ponderous, eventually turning into a long confessional circuit. Ray’s monologues spiral from child sexual abuse to military atrocities during the Troubles — the past bleeding into the present, with not much present to contend with.
Day-Lewis can still hold the screen like no one else. His Ray is a wounded animal, sarcastic, unpredictable, prone to bursts of laughter and rage — Daniel Plainview or Bill the Butcher rewritten for a pseudo-naturalist drama. But the dialogue is too often tin-eared (“We were the phantom soldiers”), and the scenes feel more like actor showcases than lived confessions. There’s a priest monologue that turns gleefully scatological — “I manured him” — but it’s empty provocation.
Violence and faith haunt the story but remain atmosphere, not inquiry. The film opens on children’s drawings of atrocities — crude crayon sketches of bombings, soldiers, and figures with guns. Northern Ireland, the Troubles, a child trying to make sense of violence. The film never develops this idea. Like much else here, it’s a strong image without a second thought behind it. Trauma as décor.
Bean’s Jem is a quiet, decent man, mostly reduced to blearily reacting to Ray’s tirades. Ray’s long-abandoned wife Nessa (Samantha Morton) frets, Bottomley’s Brian fumes, and Safia Oakley-Green’s Hattie (Brian’s maybe-girlfriend) mostly makes worried eyes at him. Everyone’s orbiting Ray, and the film can’t imagine a world without him.
The film seems to be intended as a Jez Butterworth play – The Ferryman by way of Jerusalem – directed by Paul Thomas Anderson: cosmic coincidence, earthy dialogue. There’s even a familiar sequence where the whole cast, separately, stares upward as strange objects fall from the sky — albeit apocalyptic hail rather than Magnolia‘s rain of frogs. It should be profound, instead it’s just a reference.
At least Anemone is beautiful. Ben Fordesman’s cinematography washes everything in blue-green light — part fairy tale, part fever dream. The woods shimmer: grass like water, trees purple in the distance. Guðnadóttir’s score buzzes and drones, elevating the material’s thinness with mood. Fairy tales only work as allegory, and here there’s nothing below the surface. The film floats between theatre and dreamscape, never quite comfortable as either.
Every time Ray and Jem seem to make progress — a hike, a hunt, a trip to the beach — they end up back at Ray’s cabin. Just when you think the story might go somewhere: bang, back at the fucking cabin. The pacing turns meandering, occasionally interminable.
Out of context, a scene where Ray meets a translucent creature — somewhere between The Abyss’ water-alien and a spectral giraffe — which he immediately identifies as “Brian,” would be hilarious. It’s not un-funny in context either.
The film’s title, Anemone, apparently refers to the flower, not the sea creature. It doesn’t matter. Neither meaning connects.
So, see Anemone? No — just wait for the YouTube compilation.
