Anemone should have been an event, the film that coaxes Daniel Day-Lewis out of retirement and gives him something thorny to tear into. He is working with his son, Ronan Day-Lewis, on a project about fathers, sons, and the resentments that calcify between them. What arrives is a brooding melodrama that mistakes mood for substance, a grunge gray lament that never finds a pulse.
Day-Lewis plays Ray, a war veteran living out his days in a forest cabin, half hiding and half waiting. Sean Bean is Jem, the brother who turns up with practical concerns and a plea for Ray to come home and help with his spiraling son. Samantha Morton bridges the two men as Ray’s ex and Jem’s current wife, a knot the film treats as destiny rather than drama. They drink, they circle old wounds, they talk around the thing instead of through it.
The concept reads like a clear lane for an actor’s showcase. The script gives Day-Lewis surprisingly little to do. He glowers and he withdraws. The great shapeshifter who charged Phantom Thread with equal parts class and danger is mostly asked to hunch and mumble. Bean brings a lived-in testiness that helps, and Morton adds steady gravity, but the conversations keep looping back to the same thin revelations.
Ronan Day-Lewis can set a tone. The film has the damp chill and stubborn silence of the recent Cillian Murphy and Tim Mielants collaborations, Small Things Like These and Steve. He finds lonely rooms and weathered textures, then lets them sit. What is missing is a shape. First features often need rails, a clearer plot thread to hold the mood in place. Here the vagueness becomes a dodge, and the family riddle never deepens beyond its logline.
The backstory has the makings of a bruising domestic knot. Jem married Ray’s ex so he could help raise Ray’s son, played by Samuel Bottomley, after Ray disappeared into himself. On screen it plays like a premise that no one wants to interrogate. Hurt feelings are implied rather than dramatized. History is recited rather than felt. The actors sell edges of a life that the movie refuses to show.
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I kept thinking of how many different registers Day-Lewis has found for stubborn men, and how little Anemone asks of him beyond the outline. If this is the opening chapter of a comeback, I hope the next script gives him a reason to move.
Score: 4/10
Anemone (2025)
- Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean, Samantha Morton, Samuel Bottomley
- Director: Ronan Day-Lewis
- Genre: Drama
- Runtime: 125 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: October 3, 2025
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