Daniel Day-Lewis Returns in Dark Family Drama

The first thing to note about Anemone is that it marks a magnificent emergence from eight years of retirement for the great Daniel Day-Lewis, who stepped away from acting following 2017’s exquisite chamber piece, Phantom Thread. Looking lean and strong, with a shock of silver hair and a thick walrus mustache that might make Sam Elliott feel threatened, the three-time Oscar winner’s magnetic intensity remains undimmed. Playing a brooding, taciturn man living in self-imposed exile for two decades, Day-Lewis’ rugged performance provides a semblance of narrative weight in a drama that’s otherwise lacking.

Co-written by the actor with his son Ronan Day-Lewis, making his feature directing debut, Anemone shows a young filmmaker with a boldly textured visual sense and a sharp eye for composition. Cinematographer Ben Fordesman’s arresting widescreen images of the Northern English landscapes and dense woodlands create a sweeping canvas, even if the self-consciously enigmatic story becomes dwarfed by the physical settings.

Focus Features will release the Plan B Entertainment production in October, following its world premiere as a New York Film Festival Spotlight selection.

Intergenerational trauma is fast becoming the most over-trafficked theme of 21st-century indie cinema — second only to the journey of self-discovery. Despite the political specificity of the family history unearthed here, the script presumes a level of profundity that’s just not there in the movie’s ponderous silences and woozy montages. You can feel the director straining for poignancy in closing scenes that point toward possible reconciliation, but the drama remains unaffecting.

Ray Stoker (Day-Lewis Sr.) has lived the life of a hermit for 20 years in a primitive cabin deep in the woods, hunting, cooking meals on a wood-burning stove, washing his clothes in water from a nearby river and running to keep fit. The only sign of him having made this lonely place a home beyond bare-bones essentials is a patch of delicate white flowers that give the film its title, later revealed to be the same bloom cultivated by his father.

Ray’s solitude is interrupted by the unannounced arrival of his brother Jem (Sean Bean), whom he greets without warmth, using more grunts and gestures than actual words. While Ray seems divorced from any sense of spirituality, Jem is a devoutly religious man, as evidenced by the words “Only God Can Judge Me” tattooed across his shoulders as he prays for strength to face the tasks ahead. Jem brings a letter from his partner Nessa (Samantha Morton), outlining a family crisis with their boy Brian (Samuel Bottomley), whose bloodied knuckles indicate a violent nature that has prompted his withdrawal.

From early on, the tortured family dynamic becomes clear, explaining Nessa’s reasons for turning to Ray for help. But the screenplay rejects clean narrative lines, as if withholding its truths will lend the pared-down story more complexity.

This pays off to some extent because Day-Lewis is such a mesmerizing presence, Ray’s gruff manner and terse communications hinting at dark mysteries to be revealed. But although Bean is a strong actor, his role is mostly reactive, creating an imbalance in the two-character scenes that dominate the movie, and a slight staginess in a structure built around chewy monologues.

Admittedly, some of those monologues are bracing, notably Ray’s vivid account of his revenge — real or fabricated — against the priest who sexually abused him as a child. Mentions of Ray and Jem’s disciplinarian father point to a corresponding environment of physical violence at home. It emerges that the brothers served with different branches of the British military during the Northern Ireland conflict, and Ray’s direct experience with IRA violence has left him psychologically scarred.

Morton has moments of stirring vulnerability as Brian’s careworn mother, whose history with Ray makes her fear that her son could go down a comparably bleak path. Bottomley plays the bruised, angry young man with conviction, but the script never puts enough meat on the bones of his conflict to make Brian much more than a generic casualty of a troubled family. Anemone ends up being too distancing to solicit much emotional involvement in any of them.

The director’s handling of mystical visions that haunt Ray is less than seamless, but his embrace of elemental forces is effective, particularly a hailstorm of near-biblical proportions that proves cathartic. The extensive embellishment of a score by Bobby Krlic (the English musician who records as the Haxan Cloak), drenched in moody synths and guitar, fits the tone but also adds to the nagging sense that the younger Day-Lewis’ storytelling too often mistakes padding for atmosphere.

What lingers as the end credits roll is Daniel Day-Lewis’ noble face — full of sorrow, resentment, guilt and shame, emotions that Ray spends much of the early action masking in hardened indifference. Regardless of the film’s shortcomings, it’s a thrill to have this giant of an actor back on a movie screen, hopefully next time with a more satisfyingly fleshed-out screenplay.