Anemone Review: Daniel Day-Lewis Makes a Small-Scale Return

NYFF: Daniel Day-Lewis Returns with Family On His Mind in Anemone

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Now that Daniel Day-Lewis has seemingly completed his tour of pre-World War II American history, Anemone brings him into the present day for the first time in nearly 30 years, breaking a longer streak than his two-time collaborator Paul Thomas Anderson. It also brings him out of the closest he’s come to actual retirement: an eight-year break since Phantom Thread, the longest of his career (especially notable when said career has produced seven feature films in a quarter-century). At a New York Film Festival screening, Day-Lewis allowed some regret for allowing his pause in acting to be framed in those terms, just because of the attention it inevitably receives, but also expressed a feeling that to not do this movie just to avoid contradicting something he said six or seven years ago would be worse than any perceived take-backs.

Still, Day-Lewis didn’t exactly sound as if Anemone would mark a newly prolific phase in his career. There’s something deeply sweet about the fact that short of a Scorsese, Spielberg, or Anderson, what will coax Day-Lewis back into cinema is the opportunity to work with his family, whether with his wife Rebeca Miller on The Ballad of Jack and Rose, or his son Ronan Day-Lewis on Anemone, which the younger Day-Lewis directed, from a screenplay written with his dad. (Let’s assume he had a second cousin or something working on Nine in some capacity.)

His first-ever screenwriting credit is in service of a much smaller movie and character than the more titanic figures he’s occasionally played over the past few decades. Yet there is a touch of Day-Lewis’s isolated characters for Paul Thomas Anderson in Ray Stoker, though Ray seems less inclined to compromise that isolation, the way that There Will Be Blood’s Daniel Plainview must make some concessions to the humanity where he finds “nothing worth liking” in order to become an oil baron, or how the fussy designer of Phantom Thread does ultimately submit to the love of his life. Ray, on the other hand, left his former partner Nessa (Samantha Morton) and their son Brian (Samuel Bottomley) years and years ago, retreating into a shack deep in the woods.

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That’s where his brother Jem (Sean Bean), who has stepped in as both partner and father in Ray’s absence, must go to retrieve him when Brian is faced with a spot of trouble. Brian has gone AWOL from the military, and has less than a week to change his mind or face severe punishment. The thinking seems to be that Ray, a former military man himself who fought against the IRA years ago, might coax his son into returning, sparing the young man’s life from ruin. Why a committed hermit with an eventually-revealed dark chapter in his military past is considered a good candidate to argue against going AWOL is not especially clear. The closer the movie hews to anything resembling traditional domestic drama, the less satisfying it is.

That unfortunately extends to Samantha Morton’s scenes back home; though her presence is always welcome, time spent with Nessa and Brian largely function like material that would be appended to “open up” a two-hander play, bringing offstage characters to the screen. They feel like imperfect solutions, not fully organic creations – while on the other hand, Ray and Jem are frequently captivating, especially early on. There’s something grimly funny about the way Jem appears as Ray’s unwanted guest, with the brothers suddenly not just back in each other’s lives but actively sharing an extremely small space. (That’s the problem with living in remote woods: Not a lot of other spaces to direct a visitor who shows up at your barely-there door.)

The physical details of Ray’s minimalist existence are vivid: The stew that he serves with a spatula, the way his grip on an axe trembles slightly when Jem arrives, the naturally forbidding beauty of his whole environment. Day-Lewis, as expected, is utterly convincing inhabiting this space, with two very different showstopping monologues, one grossly comic and one filling in a defining event in his past. It’s easy to forget, given his legendary status and reluctance to play the game, how much fun it can be to watch Day-Lewis at work; no matter how serious the material, there’s a buzzing joy of communication beneath the anguish, and there’s the barest hint of a wink in him playing a man who removes himself from public life, albeit less public and more removed. And Bean holds his own in scenes that require partnership, not showboating; it never feels as if the two-time-Oscar-winner is pushing his co-star around.

No, if there’s an actorly indulgence going on here, it’s secondhand; the younger Day-Lewis has the kind of first-feature leeway with his slow push-ins and gradual push-outs that’s probably more affordable when your dad is one of the most beloved and talented performers of his generation. Ronan Day-Lewis has done work as a painter, and Anemone is indeed painterly, but rather than the non-forested portions making a meditative, slow-burn picture more accessible, they wind up doing the opposite. The cutaways to Morton and Bottomley break the movie’s spell, bogging it down in re-incantations. The Day-Lewis team’s gritty depiction of brotherly connection (almost “telepathic,” the elder said at the press conference) enduring years of weathering – literal, at one point – is worthwhile. Yet after so many years, it’s bound to feel a little paltry, too.

Director: Ronan Day-Lewis
Writer: Ronan Day-Lewis, Daniel Day-Lewis
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean, Samantha Morton, Samuel Bottomley
Release Date: September 28, 2025 (New York Film Festival); October 3, 2025 (theaters)

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.

NYFF: Daniel Day-Lewis Returns with Family On His Mind in Anemone