Review: Anemone

The first images of Anemone don’t so much invite you in as drag you out into the damp cold: a motorcycle growling through the washed-out woodlands of Northern England, the sky the color of spoiled milk, the trees bare as bones. It’s an opening that tells you exactly what kind of movie you’re in for—one where hope is rationed out in teaspoons, and where every character looks as if they’ve been soaking in grief for decades.

At the heart of this story is Ray Stoker (Daniel Day-Lewis), a former British soldier who once defected to the IRA, only to flee into self-imposed exile after the weight of guilt, violence, and betrayal became too much to carry. Now he lives alone in a mossy hovel, his life reduced to foraging, staring into firelight, and spitting venom at anyone unlucky enough to cross his path. That “anyone” turns out to be his brother Jem (Sean Bean), who arrives to coax Ray back toward some version of responsibility after his estranged son Brian (Samuel Bottomley) lashes out in a violent act that reeks of inherited trauma.

The setup is deceptively simple—a broken family, reunited under duress—but Anemone is more interested in simmering tension than narrative propulsion. Ronan Day-Lewis directs with a painter’s eye and a taste for silence, letting the woodland gloom swallow up his characters until they feel like phantoms. Cinematographer Ben Fordesman shoots every frame as though sunlight is an endangered species, and Bobby Krlic’s score pulses, if a little too insistently, like a dying heartbeat, part synth dirge, part funereal hymn. The result is a film that looks and sounds more like a horror story than a family drama, though the ghosts here are entirely of the human kind.

And then there’s Daniel Day-Lewis. Back from retirement (again), he throws himself into Ray as if the man’s every gesture is weighed down by the crimes of his past. He’s repulsive, magnetic, and bleakly funny in equal measure. One monologue about an act of revenge against a predatory priest veers from grotesque to devastating, a reminder of just how much rage and shame Ray has metabolized over the years. Across from him, Sean Bean does excellent work as Jem, the brother who stayed behind to patch together the family Ray abandoned. Jem is a severely underwritten character but Bean brings him to life. Their scenes together ache with unspoken history, two men bound by blood but poisoned by everything else.

If the performances give Anemone its sting, the script sometimes dulls the edge. Ronan and Daniel Day-Lewis have written a film heavy on monologues and light on actual interplay. Samantha Morton, playing Ray’s long-suffering wife Nessa, is criminally underused, and Bottomley’s Brian feels more like a symbol of generational damage than a flesh-and-blood character. The story gestures at larger themes of war, abuse, and faith, but often funnels them into dialogue so spiky it feels written to be underlined in a script rather than spoken aloud.

That said, Anemone also has a knack for the surreal. A late sequence in which Ray stumbles across a translucent figure in the woods—a hallucination, a ghost, or both—is intriguing even as it edges into overstatement. The biblical hailstorm that follows feels like a filmmaker reaching for grandeur and grabbing a little too hard. The film's final act is too tidy and buttoned up to deliver on the simmering promise of a more substantial exchange between father and son.

What makes the film work, despite its indulgences, is its conviction. This is a movie that commits completely to its damp, heavy mood. It may stumble when it tries to knot its many threads together, but the journey is so bleakly mesmerizing that the final untidiness feels almost fitting. Anemone isn’t a film about redemption, but about the rot that festers when redemption is denied—how shame, violence, and silence get passed down like heirlooms.

Bleak, flawed, and occasionally overwrought, Anemone nevertheless sinks its hooks in. It’s a family drama dressed like a ghost story, anchored by a towering performance from Day-Lewis that makes you wonder why he ever retired in the first place.

3/5