I went into the screening for Anemone for the same reason, I believe, as the vast majority of people: to witness the return of Daniel Day-Lewis (Phantom Thread) to the big screen. The artist is frequently acclaimed as the GOAT of acting, and the news of his return, after an eight-year absence, was a cinematic event in itself. Coupled with that was the eagerness to see what his son, Ronan Day-Lewis, had to offer in his directorial debut, a project he co-wrote with his father. I knew Sean Bean (The Lord of the Rings) and Samantha Morton (Minority Report) were also part of the cast, but I walked in completely blind to the premise.
(For clearer reading, I’ll refer to the actor as DDL and the filmmaker as RDL).
Anemone is a psychological drama starring DDL as Ray, a hermit isolated in the north of England. His brother, Jem (Bean), makes a journey to find him and bring him back to the family, which includes Nessa (Morton) and Ray’s son, Brian (Samuel Bottomley, How to Have Sex). The central idea is one of reconciliation and confrontation with a deep, painful family secret, linked to war trauma and toxic masculine legacies.
There’s no use beating around the bush: Anemone is the classic paradigm of “style over substance.” It’s an overtly ambitious film, overloaded with artistic symbolism, which proves impervious on an emotional level and is filled with moments so abstract or evocative that they led me, and many others in the room, to question: “what just happened?” The audience reactions — with many walkouts and sleeping spectators — attested to how difficult it was to invest in the narrative. It’s a challenge for a critic to admit that much of the movie’s meaning simply went ungrasped on the first viewing, but RDL’s execution fails to achieve the goal of making the complex even minimally digestible.
The fragility of Anemone rests on its dull ‘slow-burn’ pace and dramatic disproportion. DDL dominates the screen, but he does so through an almost endless sequence of incredibly long monologues while Bean is relegated to the role of the silent observer, merely staring expressionlessly at his brother for most of the runtime. It’s an interaction that quickly becomes tedious and exhausting. Of course, with his singular ability to command attention, DDL delivers one or two monologues that are genuinely interesting and mesmerizing, demonstrating that his fierce talent remains intact. However, not even the supposed incomparable actor can rescue a story so heavy, complex, and poorly executed in terms of emotional accessibility.
At its core, Anemone aspires to be the story of Ray, a lost man who abandoned his family and embarks on an arc of regret and redemption. However, the film never allows these feelings to materialize in a meaningful or impactful manner. The exploration of generational trauma and inherited masculine violence, which links Ray’s military experience to his son’s aggressive behavior, is highly theoretical but devoid of emotional resonance. The screenplay builds immense suspense around the father-son relationship and the secret that separates them, but the resolution is so subtle and inconclusive that it becomes extremely disappointing and anticlimactic.
Technically, the movie offers glimpses of the filmmaker’s potential. The cinematography by Ben Fordesman (Phantom Thread) is an unquestionable element of merit. In Anemone, there are wonderful wide shots of landscapes, beaches, and mountains that give it undeniable visual beauty. However, even here, RDL yields to excess, with an exaggerated quantity of wide-shot-to-close-up camera movements that demonstrate a certain stylistic obsession. Furthermore, alongside the visual splendor, elements of magical realism VFX emerge that are so preposterous — like a storm that appears out of nowhere or certain images that feel completely disconnected — that they provoked laughs of disbelief. It’s a visually grand and, simultaneously, disconcerting film.
The score by Bobby Krlic (Phantom Thread) is equally powerful in certain moments, but its impact is compromised by abrupt transitions to black or to the next scene, which seem ill-conceived and harm the dramatic flow.
It’s unlikely someone could finish this first screening and coherently unravel the meaning of every scene and symbol. The density of subtext and the sheer number of philosophical and metaphorical choices make total understanding virtually impossible for the average viewer. Anemone feels designed to be studied, not felt. Only after some research — like I did on the meaning of the title and how it symbolizes fragility and Ray’s memories — do the distinct monologues and the overall story gain a layer of meaning. But the fact that exhaustive homework is required to understand the movie proves, in part, that the film drastically fails to convey its message.
Anemone will go down in history for marking the return of a legend whose potential was, for the most part, wasted. Ronan Day-Lewis’ debut exhibits remarkable aesthetic courage and unbridled ambition, but his insistence on symbolism and pretentiousness robs the audience of any chance to establish a lasting emotional connection. Daniel Day-Lewis’ mastery is transformed into an artistic sacrifice, where infinite monologues become pieces of a puzzle never clarified or completed. It’s a movie that uses personal trauma as raw material but fails to make us feel the weight of that pain, ultimately becoming a visually sublime prison where trauma manifests as the silence that, when finally broken, only screams to itself.
