Title – Anemone (2025)

Director – Ronan Day-Lewis (feature debut)

Cast – Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean, Samuel Bottomley, Samantha Morton

Plot – Jem (Bean) heads into the secluded English woods with aims of reconnecting with his estranged brother Ray (Day-Lewis) with whom he shares a complicated history with.  

“All is not forgiven”

Review by Eddie on 09/12/2025

After announcing his retirement following the release of critical art-house hit Phantom Thread in 2017, any film fan worth their salt were overjoyed to here that legendary 3x Oscar winning acting heavyweight Daniel Day-Lewis was returning to our screens to a part of his son Ronan’s feature debut, Anemone.

A film he also co-wrote with Ronan, Day-Lewis must have felt a burning passion to return to our screens and saw much potential in this Brad Pitt produced drama but this dialogue driven English set feature that co-stars Sean Bean is a movie, that for lack of a better word, is downright boring.

It’s certainly not a word I like to personally use when describing a film, even some of the worst films you can watch are far from boring but Anemone’s po-faced delivery, plodding plot and uninteresting characters combine to create one of Day-Lewis’s worst films even though the beloved performer does what he can do with such a bland character and world.

Set almost entirely within the confines of Day-Lewis’s Ray’s remote cabin and the woods that surround it deep in the English countryside as his younger brother Jem (a wide-eyed passenger like performance from the usually reliable Bean) comes for an overdue catch-up, Anemone asks a lot of its actors and its audience and was reliant on pinpoint direction, tight editing and razor sharp scripting to carry it home, none of which is present in this final product.

There’s clearly a lot Anemone has to say on everything from family, religion, war and Irish history but it doesn’t mean Ronan Day-Lewis knows how to say it in an interesting way and the bland delivery and construction of his film means its constantly in a battle to hold our attention and while our interest is tested, not even Day-Lewis at his most powerful and scenery chewing (think There Will be Blood or Gangs of New York) could’ve helped save this snoozefest from the scrapheap.

Early on, when the mystery behind these two brothers’ pasts and what lead Jem to reconnect with his estranged and socially outcast sibling is still an unknown factor there appears to be a chance Anemone has a great dramatic package to unlock but that hope and potential is wiped away by an endless barrage of conversational scenes between Ray and Jem and random interludes, that while looking fantastic thanks to Ben Fordesman’s DOP work, add little to the overall engagement levels of Ronan Day-Lewis’s debut.

Coaxing the actor that could well be the very best to have ever done it out of retirement, the expectation levels of Anemone were justifiably high, making this pretty but hollow experience a genuine disappointment for all involved, placing a question mark about Ronan’s ability to have a long-standing career in the industry like his father.

Final Say –

With early flickers of something special, Anemone descends into an endless barrage of uninteresting dialogue exchanges and half-explored concepts of issues and topics that have all been covered off in far more interesting ways before. While it’s good to see Day-Lewis back on screen, it’s a shame this was the project he returned for.

1 cabin dance-off out of 5