Anemone
First screened and reviewed in October 2025
Director: Rowan Day-Lewis. Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean, Samantha Morton, Samuel Bottomley, Safia Oakley-Green. Screenplay: Daniel Day-Lewis and Rowan Day-Lewis. In Brief:
Brings enough muscularity to image and soundscape, and to male withholding and volcanic release, to offer fresh experience.
VOR:③
Some themes plainly familiar; even the manner if not the detail of bolder conceits have precedent. Still, this debut has energy and an earnest voice.
I'm glad we are getting more storytelling in all forms about how men need to stop hoarding and abusing personal and institutional power. Anemone reminded me that we could also use more storytelling about needing more men to process and open up about their shit so that it can start getting dislodged and release all the emotional hostages these men are keeping in their orbit, jesus christ would you STOP relying on taciturnity and avoidance as if they are helping anybody, including you???.
I will not be surprised if some audiences sag a bit in the face of yet another North England story about kiln-blasted men still furious at tyrannical fathers and lascivious priests and what they experienced during the Irish Troubles. Especially at the script level, Anemone's gift has not much to do with originality. But I also think it's worth re-sensitizing ourselves to what a powerful triple-cocktail of inherited psychic and spiritual affliction that would be, as corroborated by the sheer volume of fictional and nonfictional narratives from that part of the world still struggling with any or all of those ordeals. I could imagine a version of Anemone that offers more space and texture to Samuel Bottomley's Brian, as the biological son of Daniel Day-Lewis's character and the adoptive one of the uncle-turned-stepfather played by Sean Bean. But you listen to everything that gets said between Day-Lewis's Ray and Bean's Jem, and also to the patterns of silence between their speeches (sometimes pregnant, sometimes blank), and it's no surprise that this generation of wounded men would beget not just a flailing 20-year-old son but a young man who's not even up to the task yet of emerging as a full character on screen. Director/cowriter Rowan Day-Lewis allows Brian to just be a tremulous but opaque placeholder for whomever he might become if the adults around him, and perhaps the surrounding culture as well, start taking out the psychic trash.
(I can't quite ride to the rescue in the same way for the women characters, including Safia Oakley-Green as Brian's pharmacist pal and Samantha Morton, getting a bit stuck as she did in The Messenger as third wheel in a movie that's all about a bruised and bruising dialogue between wounded guys.)
As debut director, Rowan overworks some of his shots, some of his soundtrack, and some of his one-off spectacles. I thought of my friend Tim saying about a Nuri Bilge Ceylan movie, "The weather is overacting." That's often true here, too, though I did admire the disconcerting scale and gusto of a climactic hailstorm and the ambiguity it confers on the family reunion that seems to be nearing. (Is the "storm" finally over or just beginning?) I'm also glad for any young filmmaker who is very interested in long speeches and dialogue exchanges but just as interested for long minutes at a time to let camerawork, sound, and montage signal whatever he thinks we need to know or intuit cinematically about his characters and scenario. Almost anyone could get their red pen out and offer some editorial notes about what could be shortened, expanded, cut, or reworked in Anemone. There's an early monologue, scary but ribald, that absolutely benefits from confining itself to unbroken close-up on the speaker, and a later one that might have profited from at least some glancing cutaways to what's being described. Tilts toward the folkloric are almost compulsory in this physical and thematic geography, but viewers' mileage will vary on how well they work here.
All of that said, I was moved and impressed by Anemone's strengths (the score, the lensing, and Daniel Day-Lewis primary among them), and I was patient with its slower or more suffocated passages. Even when it exhibited some hard-to-deny miscalculations of an eager first-timer, I was glad they reflected someone really trying to make a film, testing out and savoring the value in all of the medium's tools. Anemone felt to me like a potent statement even if it's not all shaped and sutured quite right, and it can careen in short spaces between its best and shakiest qualities. Families often do that, too, and so do high-pressure, long-postponed emotional summits, and so do men feeling their way, perhaps for the first time, toward self-disclosure and cathartic release. Who knows if any of this will take—what the characters are trying to achieve, or the career Rowan Day-Lewis has in mind—but color me intrigued. Grade:B
(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
