Director: Ronan Day-Lewis
Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean, Samantha Morton
Screenplay: Daniel Day-Lewis, Ronan Day-Lewis
121 mins. Rated R for language throughout.

I don’t think any of us really expected Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood) to stay retired following his performance in Phantom Thread, but I wonder how many offers came his way until his own son Ronan yanked him back to celluloid for the film Anemone. Both father and son contributed to the screenplay, a story of fathers, brothers, and sons, and the mysteries surrounding this unusual family unit are captivating, even if their ultimate reveals are less so.

Jem Stoker (Sean Bean, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring) embarks on a journey to find his brother, Ray (Day-Lewis), a man who is not lost but not wanting to be found. Jem’s family desperately needs Ray to come home and deal with the fragments of his past, but parts of that past continually haunt Ray all the same.

Day-Lewis has lost none of his acting skills in the years since he “retired.” His excellent and angry chemistry with Bean makes for some powerhouse scenes of raw emotional strength and even a very unusual but effective story of diarrhea. The most fascinating scenes in Anemone are just these two guys talking, yelling, and often sitting in silence in a cabin, and that’s not hyperbolic.

Anemone is rather light on story, but the mystery, the whys of Ray’s self-incarceration are enticing and curious, more so at the beginning of the film than in the back half when we start to get the answers. There’s enough to infer by the midpoint why Ray ran away, but the overall answer as to why Jem needs him back was a little underwhelming. Still, it gives Day-Lewis and Bean a lot of fire in their interactions, and where the film leaves us was the perfect ending. It’s just that the developing story gets a little lost in the weeds and quite repetitive once it starts to unfold.

Director Ronan Day-Lewis has a sizable task to tackle with Anemone, directing his own father, considered by many to be one of the greatest actors in the history of cinema, living or deceased. All that given, it’s his visual palette that so won me over. Day-Lewis directs Anemone almost like a fantasy, with sweeping visuals of lush forest and intimate moments featuring two siblings finally reunited and playing out old imaginary stories and games. There’s a sequence of the two of them doing what I can only describe as a rhythmic dance while the camera pans out to reveal their small imprint in a larger world, a small box in a large forest, very indicative of Ray’s viewpoint on himself, small and unimportant to the rest of the world, and vice versa.

Anemone is a solid feature debut from Ronan Day-Lewis with some terrific performances, a few beautiful technical flourishes, and more than a few narrative surprises. While the questions it raises are more interesting than the eventual answers, I’d easily watch more of Day-Lewis and Bean facing off in a shack, and I hope we don’t have to wait 8 more years for another film with the legendary performer.

3.5/5
-Kyle A. Goethe