Eight years after Phantom Thread and a much-publicized retirement, Daniel Day-Lewis has returned to the screen in Anemone, the feature debut of his son Ronan Day-Lewis. On paper, it’s a cool collaboration: a legendary actor working with his son on a film they wrote together. In reality, the film is a hollow slog. It’s an arthouse college film exercise that mistakes silence for depth and atmosphere for substance. And not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s freaking boring. What could’ve been a tight 20-minute short is stretched into a bloated, joyless two-hour endurance test.
The story refuses to start. The first half of Anemone is practically inert. Sean Bean’s Jem trudges through forests on a mission whose purpose isn’t revealed until nearly an hour in. Until then, we’re left with endless long takes of him walking, praying, and staring into the void. It’s not suspenseful … It’s tedious. There’s almost no dialogue, and the silence doesn’t illuminate anything about the characters. Instead, it leaves the viewer stranded, with no sense of why any of this matters. Even Daniel Day-Lewis’s Ray, introduced as a reclusive hermit, is frustratingly undefined for far too long. Is he a haunted British soldier? A former IRA fighter? Some other tragic figure realing from sexual abuse or is that just a red herring? The film flirts with these ideas but never commits, leaving everything drifting in ambiguity.
To Ronan Day-Lewis’s credit, he has a striking visual style. He delivers a handful of images that linger: storm clouds pressing down on lush green woods, a cabin wall collapsing away to reveal a dance between brothers, a carnival glowing in the dark like a hallucination. The score adds to the spell, pulsing and haunting in a way the script never does. On a purely technical level, Anemone can be gorgeous, but it might as well be a film school exam on technical exercises. Movies have to be more than pretty pictures. Compelling stories are what brings us to the theater, otherwise low budget films couldn’t make it. The film mistakes its slow pace for meaning, dragging the audience through long stretches of silence that ultimately signify very little.
Unsurprisingly, Day-Lewis is the one element that still commands attention. Even after years away, his presence is magnetic, and in two late monologue scenes, he unleashes the kind of performance that reminds you why he’s often called the greatest actor of his generation. One is darkly funny, the other devastating in its vulnerability. His monologues are flashes of brilliance in an otherwise empty experience.
Sean Bean is wasted as Jem, reduced to little more than a silent observer, while Samantha Morton and Samuel Bottomley, as the family left behind, are stuck in dreary, underwritten subplots. The whole film bends itself around Daniel Day-Lewis’s gravity.
That said, it does prove two things. 1: Day-Lewis, even in semi-retirement, can still deliver a performance that dwarfs nearly everyone else. 2: Ronan Day-Lewis has an eye for imagery, but he has yet to prove he has anything to say.
The biggest crime is that some critics will fawn over this film because of Daniel Day-Lewis. It’s not worth it. Watch a snippet on TikTok. 2/10 only for the two monologues.
