The first time Daniel Day-Lewis shows up in Anemone, he’s cloaked in shadow, sitting inside a small cabin in the middle of the North England wilderness. It’s a nearly indecipherable introduction that almost feels by design—a soft, silhouetted launch for his unexpected and welcome return to the big screen. In 2017, right before the press tour for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, the three-time Oscar winner announced his retirement from acting, marking the end of a prolific and singular career. He’d taken breaks before—like in 1997, when he left Hollywood to become a shoemaker in Italy for several years. But this second schism felt different. He was leaving “for good,” he said, the kind of bold declaration that doesn’t leave room for interpretation. Which is why, eight years later, when the light eventually catches his 68-year-old features to reveal a thick goatee, short white hair, and that familiar gaunt face, it’s both a thrilling reveal and a reminder that even the greats can swallow their pride and heed the call to create again.
Who has coaxed him back? Ronan Day-Lewis, his 27-year-old son, a longtime painter making his directorial debut with a script that the pair co-wrote after years batting around ideas together. At first glance, it might seem like a father lending his name and credibility to help kickstart his son’s pet project in search of financing—except that the younger Day-Lewis has crafted something haunting and exquisite, a slow-burning, two-handed meditation about grief, regret, and the kind of absence that irreparably fractures a family. Mostly, though, it supplies the elder Day-Lewis a chance to flex his dormant muscles, most prominently with a couple of monologues—one humorous and scatological in nature, the other reflective, darker, and more vulnerable—that sneak up on you in overwhelming ways. It’s been a long time since the actor has talked and laughed and yelled and cried in front of the camera. You’d never really know it.
Named after the flowers whose petals fold inward as a storm approaches, Anemone tells the story of a former British soldier named Ray (Day-Lewis), who has been living as a shame-stricken, self-imposed hermit in the woods for the last 16 years. His solitude is interrupted when his brother, Jem (Sean Bean), shows up to his remote location unannounced and asks to stay with him. This isn’t a weekend retreat from civilization. Ray’s teenage son, Brian (Samuel Bottomley), has begun to spiral down a similar path of self-destruction, a descent that Jem and Brian’s mother, Nessa (Samantha Morton), believe only Ray can address and correct. To save his son, Ray will need to emerge from hiding and confront a past that has kept him isolated from the world.
That will take some time. The younger Day-Lewis doesn’t share much exposition, which is both intentional and occasionally frustrating. Over the first third of the movie, Ray and Jem barely speak to each other, an acclimatization period filled with liquor and dancing that Jem is careful not to expedite lest he scare his brother into defensive histrionics. Instead, information is carefully doled out—in small bites of stew, while berry-picking in the windswept woods, and during hunting trips in open clearings. The only way Ray can help a son he’s never met is if he reckons with the atrocities only he witnessed during The Troubles in Northern Ireland. In the meantime, Jem can only try to understand, to parse the demons still haunting his brother. “What happened?” he asks. Ray refuses to answer, or maybe he’s just incapable.
The younger Day-Lewis intersperses these moments of disconnection with harsh, dissonant guitar chords and dark, serene imagery—trees and grass creaking and swaying in moonlight, sometimes pulling back from wide shots of the cabin that turn them into dreamlike tableaus. There’s a quiet command of the camera, reflecting the story’s meditative nature with long takes and slow zooms, creeping and hovering around the backs of his protagonists’ heads as though trying to crack open whatever they’re hiding. At the New York Film Festival press conference for the film, he mentioned the way weather became a foundational entry point for the story, and you can feel its presence in his painterly instincts and youthful influences. In some ways, the movie’s more abstract, aesthetic moments—a ghostly figure hovering at the foot of a bed, a glimmering, unicorn-ish creature across a lake, a large fish drifting along the river’s current—seem plucked from Jane Schoenbrun’s unsettling oeuvre. They don’t necessarily all coalesce, but their aggregation helps explain the haunting fallout of Ray’s decision to leave his family, and builds to another exaggerated weather display colliding metaphor and reality together.
Throughout a festival season that’s conjured a string of movies about absent fathers, Anemone might be the bleakest and least accessible depiction, but perhaps the most rewarding if you remain patient. Like the way Jem continues to bide his time and nudge Ray until he delivers the movie’s seminal moment, a beachside confession that unspools all the unspoken guilt and sadness and trauma that’s afflicted him. The older Day-Lewis starts reciting it with trepidation, but it soon evolves into a feverish recollection. And then tears and barely comprehensible words. It’s a masterful moment, even more striking when you consider his son is behind the camera, listening and observing and capturing everything with a couple still, long takes. The younger Day-Lewis knows he doesn’t need to embellish anything his father is doing. This is the kind of performance worth waiting for.
Anemone premiered at the 63rd New York Film Festival and opens on October 3.
The post NYFF Review: Anemone Marks a Breakout Debut and a Riveting Return for Daniel Day-Lewis first appeared on The Film Stage.
