Daniel Day-Lewis, one of the finest actors of his generation, has emerged from his eight-year “retirement” to star in Anemone, the feature debut of his son, Ronan Day-Lewis. You can’t exactly dance around the fact such a film likely wouldn’t exist without the grace of this familial connection (the film also stars major talents Sean Bean and Samantha Morton).
Any industry-wide structural issues aside, what Anemone is and what it fails to be is much better explained by the fact Ronan is otherwise a painter, and that he co-wrote his script with his father, who’s spent a career finessing a piercing, primordial kind of male anguish. Anemone tangles up these aspects in a rather confused, disjointed way.
It is, for the most part, constructed out of isolated (sometimes surreal) images of desolation, isolation, and regret: a cabin so deep in the woods it’s nearly consumed by it; a timely apparition of an unearthly, mythic creature; a violent, Old Testament hailstorm. Its characters rarely speak, but when they do, it’s less about the words themselves than the anger in their delivery. Yet that’s precisely all Anemone can do. It shows us the pain, but not the depth of the wound.
Daniel Day-Lewis plays Ray Stoker, a former British soldier deployed in Ireland who, after an unexplained incident, retreated deep into the wilderness to live like a witch tending to her gingerbread. One day, his brother Jem (Bean) turns up with a letter from his own wife Nessa (Morton), concerning their son Brian (Samuel Bottomley). Brian’s in trouble. In short, he’s perpetuated the generational cycle of violence.
Ray and Jem, at first, don’t talk. They pace around the place like territorial cats. They brush their teeth. One prays to God, the other sees ghosts at the foot of his bed. Bean spends this time working in a delicate register, constantly on the verge of saying what he needs to say, but never quite managing it. Finally, Ray erupts. Anemone is built around several lengthy monologues – mostly delivered by Day-Lewis, a pivotal one by Morton – in which the audience are told, drop by drop, the full extent of Ray’s shame.
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Day-Lewis, reliably, commands the whole piece, with that twinkle in his eye that spells either mischief or the inciting spark of an inferno. At first, he tells the story of the faecal revenge he enacted on the priest who sexually abused him as a child, then, his account of what happened during his military service.
His face, screwed up as it is, signals regret about the latter. His words certainly don’t. Ray is either lying to us about the act that was labelled a “war crime”, or Ronan Day-Lewis has specifically and manipulatively framed the film’s events in a way that allows him to completely disengage with Irish history at large and, in turn, free his lead characters from any need to reckon with their complicity in colonial oppression.
Either way, Anemone doesn’t seem to think that kind of deeper interrogation is at all necessary. It would rather bask in a generic wave of misery, of brutalised children growing up to be brutal men, of Bobby Krlic’s heavy leaded guitar score, and cinematographer Ben Fordesman’s ominous, horror-flavoured approach to the surrounding forest. You get the sense somewhere in those trees – and we spend a good deal of the runtime staring at them – that we might find all the secrets this film refuses to share with us. But it’s hopeless. We’re lost.
Dir: Ronan Day-Lewis. Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean, Samantha Morton, Samuel Bottomley, Safia Oakley-Green. Cert 15, 126 mins.
‘Anemone’ is in cinemas from 7 November
