‘Anemone’ Review: Daniel Day-Lewis Returns in a Haunting Father-Son Drama About Guilt, Faith, and Inheritance

Daniel Day-Lewis is mesmerizing in Anemone, a haunting father-son collaboration that transforms silence into cinema — a meditation on guilt, faith, and the weight of bloodlines.

When Daniel Day-Lewis retired in 2017 after Phantom Thread, it felt final. His absence left a void — one of cinema’s great performers seemingly closing the curtain on his own mythology. So when Anemone was announced, co-written and directed by his son Ronan Day-Lewis, expectations were stratospheric. Could the most meticulous actor alive return without shattering the quiet mystique he’d built around himself? The answer, revealed at the New York Film Festival’s Spotlight section, is yes — though the film that surrounds him never quite matches the volcanic stillness of his presence.

Set in the mist-covered hills of northern England, Anemone unfolds like a folk tale told through trauma. Ray Stoker (Daniel Day-Lewis), a once-decorated soldier, has retreated into the wilderness for over twenty years, punishing himself for sins that are never fully named but deeply felt. When his estranged brother Jem (Sean Bean) appears with news that his own son (Samuel Bottomley) is falling into violence, Ray is pulled from isolation and forced to face the cycle of harm that runs through their bloodline. The story is sparse, but its silences thunder louder than dialogue. Ronan Day-Lewis directs with the patience of someone sculpting a memory, drawing out emotion through landscape and rhythm rather than exposition.

Visually, the film is breathtaking. Cinematographer Ben Fordesman captures the English countryside not as a pastoral escape, but as a haunted reflection of Ray’s mind — overcast skies, rusted machinery, the wind whistling through trees that seem older than forgiveness. There’s a near-spiritual quality to the framing, where every object feels heavy with history. The white flowers from which the film takes its title, seen growing near Ray’s cabin, become symbols of purity trying to bloom through rot — a quiet metaphor for the Day-Lewis legacy itself, renewal through remembrance.

Daniel Day-Lewis’s return is nothing short of transformative. His performance is one of sheer restraint, a man whose silence becomes its own language. When he finally speaks, it’s as though the earth itself has cracked. His delivery of a monologue describing revenge on the priest who abused him as a boy is terrifying and heartbreaking — a confession drenched in ambiguity, both a plea and a curse. You can feel the physical toll in every pause, every inhale. It’s a masterclass in presence: an actor who no longer needs to prove anything but still burns with purpose. He doesn’t play the role so much as inhabit it, turning stillness into suspense.

Sean Bean is equally compelling in quieter ways, embodying a devout man whose faith has become both salvation and denial. His dynamic with Day-Lewis is fraternal yet philosophical — a collision between punishment and repentance. Samantha Morton brings tenderness and exhaustion to Nessa, the family’s moral anchor, while Samuel Bottomley carries the film’s future on his bruised, uncertain shoulders. Together, they sketch the outline of a family bound by love, violence, and generational grief.

Ronan Day-Lewis’s direction is confident, if at times overreaching. The film bears the influence of Terrence Malick, Andrei Tarkovsky, and the austerity of Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly. His pacing is deliberate — perhaps too much so — lingering on gestures, water, and breath until meaning begins to slip away. Yet there’s an undeniable boldness to his debut. He refuses sentimentality, choosing ambiguity over closure. The result is a work of immense atmosphere and uneven momentum — sometimes transcendent, sometimes suffocating.

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Bobby Krlic’s (The Haxan Cloak) score deepens that atmosphere with swelling guitar lines and synth tones that pulse like a buried heartbeat. The soundscape — rain, fire, the scrape of a shovel against soil — becomes an emotional undercurrent, hinting at the volcanic grief the characters can’t express aloud. When the climactic storm arrives — hail pelting down as if the sky itself is breaking — the sequence feels like nature demanding confession. Ronan’s visual ambition outweighs his narrative control, but that imbalance is part of the film’s strange power.

Ultimately, Anemone is less a traditional drama than an elegy — for a man, for a family, for a generation of artists reckoning with the inheritance of pain. It’s about how violence and shame pass down through silence, and how speaking them — even too late — might be the only form of grace. The film is imperfect, sometimes ponderous, occasionally self-serious, but it feels alive with intent. It’s the kind of risk only artists with something deeply personal to exorcise could take.

For Daniel Day-Lewis, it’s a return that reaffirms his legend. For Ronan Day-Lewis, it’s an arrival that announces a filmmaker worth watching. Together, they’ve made something that trembles with history — a movie where the air between words says everything that language cannot.

Rating: ★★★★☆

CREDITS

Screened: September 30, 2025, NYFF63, Walter Reade Theater

Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean, Samantha Morton, Samuel Bottomley, Safia Oakley-Green

Director: Ronan Day-Lewis

Screenwriters: Daniel Day-Lewis, Ronan Day-Lewis

Release Date: Friday, October 3 | Focus Features

Rating: R

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