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“We do love the exquisite agony of self-denial.” Though they are uttered in an entirely (and hilariously) different context within the movie itself, these words define Ronan Day-Lewis’s Anemone in more ways than one. World premiering at the New York Film Festival, the movie itself is all about self-denial, and at times it’s an act of self-denial. That it’s exquisitely shot, and features the welcome return of Daniel Day-Lewis, the director’s father and a performer of colossal intensity, somehow makes its narrative and thematic asceticism that much more pronounced. Filled with unearthly landscapes, primeval forests, and twilight beaches, Anemone’s ornate visual design seems to underscore its characters’ emotional suffocation. The contrast is surely intentional, but it is also, sadly, not always a good thing. The film looks fantastic, but its impact dissipates the longer it drags on.
Though he insists he never really meant to retire from acting, Day-Lewis père last appeared on film seven years ago, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, which itself came five years after the actor’s previous picture, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. As a result, our popular image of him is perhaps not unlike our first glimpse of him in Anemone: a quiet, stoic hermit in the woods, living in a shack with one chair and one bowl, ready to throw an ax at the first intruder. His character, a veteran soldier named Ray, has been off the grid for some time, and to find him, his brother Jem (Sean Bean, who by the way also hasn’t made a movie in some time), has to motorbike out into the middle of a vast and overgrown forest, tear open a secret pouch, register some coordinates, and hike for what seems like days until he finds Ray’s modest woodland lair. Ray might as well be a character out of a dark fairy tale. His warrior’s intuition is like a superpower: He can tell just by the dance of light on his craggy wall if someone is near, and he doesn’t even have to look to identify that person as Jem, who might be a friendly but who brings thoroughly unwelcome news of the world beyond the trees.
Jem has come to find Ray after all these years because of trouble at home with Brian (Samuel Bottomley), Ray’s teenaged son with Nessa (Samantha Morton) whom Jem has raised as his own. The two brothers, we soon learn, fought for the British during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and Ray disappeared while Nessa was still pregnant. Early on, we see Brian in bed, his hands bloodied, refusing to talk, closed off with… rage? Grief? Inaction? The boy is so frozen we might mistake him for a coma patient at first. His demeanor is meant to establish the urgency of the matter — Jem sees him right before he whizzes off to find the long-lost Ray — but the film also wants to keep the precise nature of this crisis a mystery for as long as possible, presumably in an effort to maintain narrative suspense. That’s a cheap screenwriting trick: We’re embedded in Jem’s perspective, and both he and Nessa seem to know what’s going on, but the movie keeps us in the dark, otherwise we might realize how flimsy the whole thing is.
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The more Anemone tries to tell a story, the more it falls flat. The manufactured secrecy around Brian and his actions is meant to reflect a more organic secrecy around Ray and his buried past — that particular mystery at least makes sense, given the film’s perspective — but it also undercuts it. The resonances between their two tales evoke a kind of violence passed down from fathers to sons, but Ray’s mythic sorrows upend and overpower everything else. Partly because Daniel Day-Lewis is just so damn good at this: Eventually given a chance to deliver several extended soliloquys about his character’s dark history, he brilliantly rides the necessary waves of fury, disgust, bewilderment, entitlement, sadness, hatred, mercy, self-loathing. The spectrum of emotions he presents seems so infinite that everything else feels downright dinky in his wake. (You can imagine acting students in the future reciting these monologues in class; you can’t imagine anyone ever doing it better than he does here.) The director, who co-wrote the script with his father, isn’t afraid to lean into the theatricality of such scenes, keeping the camera fixed on his star. It’s a transcendent performance, somehow both a miracle and the kiss of death. It is good enough to almost elevate the entire movie above its many awkward shortcomings. And yet it also crystallizes those shortcomings.
The real problem with Anemone is that, with its otherworldly imagery, its oblique approach to narrative, and its not particularly original theme of generational violence, it needed to be tight and diamond-sharp instead of baggy and inert. Coiled and terse in mood, but with the florid world closing in, it’s a movie built around avoidance. That’s an exciting idea… Well, it could be an interesting idea. But Ronan Day-Lewis seems afraid to let us live in uncertainty. And so, the film’s spartan spell is undone by snatches of pedestrian drama and goofy, surreal symbolism. This is a spectacular miscalculation, but perhaps an understandable one for a young, first-time feature director. By the time Anemone builds to its frustrating conclusion, we feel we know both too much and too little — too much to remain captivated, and too little to truly care.
