‘Anemone’ review: Daniel Day-Lewis returns to the big screen in family drama directed by his son

Dir: Ronan Day-Lewis. UK. 2025. 121mins

An energized and emotional Daniel Day-Lewis returns to the big screen in Anemone, a flawed expressionistic family drama directed by his son Ronan Day-Lewis. The elder Day-Lewis play the reclusive Ray Stoker, whose quiet life is upended when his brother Jem (Sean Bean) arrives with a letter addressed from Ray’s ex-girlfriend Nessa (Samantha Morton) about their troubled son Brian (Samuel Bottomley). The role is not too dissimilar from Day-Lewis’s previous turns as emotionally unavailable men. But even for a man who could be called the greatest actor of his generation, the obtuse script and abstract visual language are too much to overcome in what is ultimately a dull, meandering film.

 The film loses focus because of the odd structuring

After debuting at New York Film Festival, Anemone will be released in the US on October 3 before playing the BFI London Film Festival and then opening in UK cinemas on November 7. The younger Day-Lewis’s feature directorial debut will surely attract immense attention, not least because it marks the return of three-time Best Actor Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis, following his announced retirement prior to the release of Phantom Thread (2017). It’s also gives the actor his first screenplay credit, as he has co-written Anemone with his son. It may not, however, be strong enough to see either Day-Lewis enter the awards conversation.

Anemone lacks coherent storytelling from the start. It begins opaquely, with Jem comforting Brian, whose knuckles are bloodied and bruised, before hopping on his motorcycle in search of Ray. Rather than directly introducing Ray, the film almost teases Day-Lewis’s appearance with three unnecessary back shots – Ray chopping wood, taking a pot off the stove, and looking up at the sun – before we finally meet him. This roundabout approach happens throughout the film, the director often opting for atmospheric flourishes that needlessly muddy the drama. 

The film is further undermined by the indiscriminate slathering of a droning ethereal score from Bobby Krlic (aka The Haxan Cloak). Ray and Jem only share around a dozen lines of the dialogue between them in the film’s first 30 minutes due to the music persistently disrupting scenes. Indeed, the majority of Anemone – which features several moments of the elder Day-Lewis friskily dancing – feels more like a music video than a film. 

While the director and his father clearly envisioned this as a contemplative story, the film loses focus because of the odd structuring. Nathan Nugent’s jagged editing jarringly moves us between Ray and Jem hanging out at Ray’s woodland cabin, tepidly discussing what caused Ray to abandon his family 20 years previously, to then depicting Brian’s angsty emotional turmoil. We barely know anything about Brian’s mother Nessa and his girlfriend (Safia Oakley-Green), who’s enchantingly introduced but never acknowledged again. 

What makes this plotting especially difficult, however, is the fact that Samuel Bottemly’s scenes often follow major actorly moments by Day-Lewis. Without too many spoilers, the film returns the actor back to the Troubles – a subject he previously explored in The Name of the Father (1993) and The Boxer (1997) – to confront themes of religion, penance, historical crimes, generational violence and brotherhood. While the director has difficulty translating those topics into a cogent visual and narrative language, the elder Day-Lewis and a resolute Bean instill these discussions with immeasurable groundedness. At one point, Day-Lewis delivers a heart-rending monologue that speaks to the difficult violence of that period and wounds it’s left on a family. It’s such a powerful and spontaneous display of emotion that Bottemly struggles to follow it when the film needlessly cuts back to his arc.

Though the younger Day-Lewis lived in a cinematic household – his mother is Maggie’s Plan director Rebecca Miller – he didn’t immediately intend to turn to directing. While directing his 2018 short The Sheep and the Wolf, he earned a BA in Art from Yale. This painterly background emerges in the film’s otherworldly vignettes and metaphysical relationship, with its wide wind-swept woodland vistas and supernatural occurrences. While there is a sense that this creative sensibility may one day be honed into a controlled cinematic vision, his inexperience undermines Anemone; despite strong support from Bean and the elder Day-Lewis.