Anemone review – Daniel Day-Lewis returns for a bleak and painfully serious misfire

New York film festival: the actor un-retires, with his son onboard to direct, for a portentous and plodding film about war-torn men

It has been eight long years since Daniel Day-Lewis last graced the screen, after the filming of 2017’s Phantom Thread left him “overwhelmed by a sense of sadness”. Retirement, it turns out, was more “retirement”, an extended bit of rest and recuperation for another gauntlet. Anemone, the three-time Oscar winner’s quote-unquote comeback film and the feature directorial debut of his son Ronan Day-Lewis, is an even less sunny experience. (At least for the viewer; Day-Lewis has described filming with his son as “beginning to end, just pure joy to spend that time together with him”.) In fact, it’s gray-skies-only for the film’s plodding two hours, the better to hammer home the point of roiling disquiet within, to quote the logline, “the complex and profound ties that exist between brothers, fathers, and sons”.

Father and son, who co-wrote the script set in the late 1980s, seem aligned on the somber task of peeling back what has not been said for two generations of stoic, war-torn men. Anemone – a title that, like the film, is vaguely symbolic and overly portentous – settles in like fog on the northern English coast: at once heavy and weightless, overcast with dour import. It starts with a prayer (from Sean Bean, face creased with unrelenting seriousness) and proceeds into the mist of unexpressed trauma, over-communicated in close-up shots of bloody knuckles, blank walls and truncated torsos.

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