How refreshing it is to see a debut film. Movies by established directors, even directors one likes, carry the burden of expectation. “Every movie is born innocent,” Richard Brody once wrote, but no movies are more innocent, or more filled with the fresh air of potential, than ones by first-time directors. Equally crushing, then, is the realization that the director in question just doesn’t have it — no wit, no touch, no unique style. Such is the experience of suffering through Ronan Day-Lewis’ debut feature Anemone, co-written by and starring his dad, acting all-timer Daniel Day-Lewis.
It starts innocently enough. Folksy drawings hint at the wounded history which serves as Anemone’s background in a horizontal scroll under increasingly urgent guitar — simultaneously whimsical and polemical. But there’s nothing more to it: the film that follows is just as opaque, building relentless portent and never, not once, fulfilling the promise such portent anticipates. In an unholy riff on Jeff Nichols, Andrea Arnold, and that corner of TikTok that does Skins edits, Day-Lewis ladles elemental omens, dime-store impressionistic imagery, and pretentious hard cuts to evade the filmmaker’s prerogative of telling an actual story.
What story there is concerns former soldier Ray Stoker, living in isolation away from society, and the son, Brian, he’s left behind. He’s sought after by his brother Jem because Brian — who Jem has been raising along with Nessa, played by Samantha Morton in a long-suffering maternal role that wastes her immense talent — is going through an emotional crisis. Occasionally, Day-Lewis will cut back to town where Brian mopes around, but there’s very little to connect the movie’s parallel tracks, and Day-Lewis kneecaps any narrative trajectory with his structure: he elides beats and withholds information, pausing to drop steamy exposition dumps only when the viewer can’t possibly follow along any further.
Anemone reeks of fresh-out-of-film-school starter kit ambiguity. Over here, make sure to place a comically huge fish in a river, floating with a big gash on its side. Don’t forget to suspend a woman above Ray’s bed — our hero’s got to be haunted by something — and you must feature a beast that looks like a Patronus from Harry Potter, you simply must. Day-Lewis makes a litany of annoying decisions here: it’s annoying to have Ray say “let’s play some tunes,” then play canned electronic music over his and Jem’s dancing; it’s annoying to put a hole in Ray’s house and pull out from it into the vast woods, only to have that hole disappear in the next shot; and when the opening notes of “Moonlight Sonata” waft in, that’s it — the try-hard sensibility has grown exasperating to the point of no recovery, the magical realist sheen completely unconvincing. Anemone wants to hit with the shoegazey force of a My Bloody Valentine record, but it lands with the obnoxious thud of a Donda 2: self-important and half-baked.
Yet Daniel Day-Lewis in a misfire is better than no Daniel Day-Lewis at all. Even in noble failures like Gangs of New York or conventional fare like My Left Foot, he lights up the screen, and it’s impossible to deny the beguiling thrill of seeing him for the first time in years. He re-enters with a keen sense of self-awareness, too: it’s no coincidence that after an introduction done in complete silence, his first line is “fuck off.” Day-Lewis is so good, he sells trite sob stories about wartime trauma and pointless diatribes against abusive priests, clearly written to satisfy his hunger for scenery-chewing monologues. His work here proves that a great actor really can be handed scraps — in fact, strangely enough, hand himself the very scraps — and turn them into gold. He plays Ray with ruddy enthusiasm, evincing mirth, cold-blooded wrath, and deep sensitivity within moments of each other and sincerely earning them.
It’s probably too much to ask Ronan to meet his father’s caliber from the jump, and there are moments, mostly at the beginning, that do suggest a burgeoning creative voice: he shows Ray and Jem sizing each other up, giving each man his own set of rituals to follow, and allowing us to see how they intersect (or don’t). It’s patient and responsible, but much like George Costanza, Ronan had everything to gain by being impatient and irresponsible, doing the exact opposite of what his instincts told him to do. Maybe he’ll beat the sophomore slump — there’s nowhere to go but up.
DIRECTOR: Ronan Day-Lewis; CAST: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean, Samantha Morton, Samuel Bottomley; DISTRIBUTOR: Focus Features; IN THEATERS: October 3; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 1 min.
Originally published as part of NYFF 2025 — Dispatch 3.
Comments are closed.