Anemone Sinks: Daniel Day-Lewis' Big Comeback Misses the Mark

Daniel Day-Lewis is back on screen. Yes, really. After stepping away post-2017, he returns with Anemone, a stark family drama he co-wrote with his son, Ronan Day-Lewis, who also directs. It sounds like catnip: a generational collaboration about generational scars, with an all-timer in front of the camera. The movie does land some heavy blows, but it also spends a lot of time staring at the wound instead of moving the story forward.

• Director: Ronan Day-Lewis (feature debut)
• Writers: Ronan Day-Lewis and Daniel Day-Lewis
• Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis (Ray Stoker), Sean Bean (Jem), Samantha Morton (Nessa), Samuel Bottomley (Brian)
• Cinematography: Ben Fordesman
• Distributor: Focus Features
• Setting: Remote woods of Northern England

The hook: myth meets novelty

Day-Lewis has basically turned into a living reference point at this stage. In May 2024 alone, three completely different movies casually name-checked him: The Fall Guy, The Garfield Movie, and Hit Man. So the return is a big deal. Anemone doubles down on that spotlight by being a father-son project that also happens to be about fathers, sons, and everything that calcifies between them over time. The concept is irresistible; the execution is not quite as bulletproof.

The setup: two brothers, twenty years, zero small talk

Day-Lewis plays Ray Stoker, a former soldier who has essentially vanished into the woods for two decades. He lives alone, off the grid, and looks like a man who talks to the wind more than he talks to people. Then his brother Jem (Sean Bean) shows up.

This is not a warm hug-and-a-laugh reunion. The vibe is uneasy, suspicious, and soaked in old grief. The film draws their split in tiny, pointed ways: there is an early dinner where Jem says grace and Ray opts out. It is a small moment that says a lot about who they became while they were not speaking. Extended family members Nessa (Samantha Morton) and Brian (Samuel Bottomley) circle the edges with their own grudges and history, though the movie never gives their thread the same clarity or urgency as the brothers.

How it plays: quiet, patient, sometimes hypnotic

Ronan Day-Lewis favors silence and watchfulness. The camera lingers on faces as they metabolize old hurts. Ben Fordesman shoots the fog and the cramped interiors with painterly precision, often locking onto Ray until the stillness almost hurts. When the film commits to that restraint, it can be gripping.

Then the dialogue hits, and you remember why people use Daniel Day-Lewis as a measuring stick. He delivers two long, blistering monologues — the kind you can already picture getting passed around in acting classes — dredging up violent, traumatic memories with surgical rhythm and control. Sean Bean meets him with a weary, lived-in gravity that keeps these scenes grounded. In those stretches, Anemone becomes the movie it clearly wants to be: a crackling confrontation with what the past does to people.

Where it stalls: a chamber piece that keeps circling the same scar

The issue is the script seems more engineered to showcase performance than to drive a story. The film often trades action for speeches, letting characters explain their pain instead of forcing them to collide. Whole sections are just people sitting at tables or by fires, reiterating what we already get. The needle does not move; it loops.

This drift gets worse when the film detours to Nessa and Brian. Morton and Bottomley are strong, but they are stranded with thinner material that reads like a placeholder for a subplot that needed another pass. Every cut away from Ray and Jem costs the movie focus and momentum.

Stray flourishes: intriguing, then abandoned

Anemone dabbles in surrealism — an early, arresting image of a woman floating near Ray's bed suggests a bolder, more dreamlike register — but those touches feel scattered and never quite pay off. You can sense what Ronan Day-Lewis is reaching for when the score swells and the brothers walk in silence: a meditation on masculinity, family, and the ghosts that stick around long after people leave. The film rarely breaks out of its schematic to fully get there.

The finale does pull the themes together with a measured punch. It lands. It just does not erase the long stretches of inertia that precede it. You leave thinking about the promise of the director and the precision of the star more than the story itself.

This plays less like a grand comeback and more like an intriguing test case.

Bottom line

Not a disaster, not a triumph. Anemone is a handsome, often haunting actor's showcase that leans hard on the legend at its center and the novelty of the father-son team-up. Strip away that aura and you are left with a beautifully photographed, dramatically underpowered chamber drama that prefers sitting with pain to dramatizing it. If you are here to watch Daniel Day-Lewis work, you will get what you came for. If you are not already on that wavelength, this may feel like a missed opportunity.

Score: 5/10 — which, for me, means 'mediocre': the highs and lows balance out to a wash.

Note: The film screened at the New York Film Festival.