Anemone

Anemone, 2025, 2 ¾ stars

Blowin’ in the wind

Day-Lewis’s return breathes life into Anemone

Exclusive to MeierMovies, October 10, 2025

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

If you doubt Leo Tolstoy’s words, watch Anemone. I guarantee no family in the history of cinema has been miserable in quite the same way as the Stokers of northern England.

Ray, still shell-shocked from his experiences during the Northern Irish “troubles” and other trauma, has been a hermit for nearly two decades, leaving his brother Jem as the stand-in father for Brian, the son Ray never met. Adding an almost incestuous layer to the story is the fact that Jem and Nessa (the woman Ray abandoned while pregnant) are now married.

Brian is haunted by his dad’s absence and reputation as a war criminal. At a crossroads in his young life, the son is seeking to understand the father’s supposed sins, if only to reassure himself that he need not suffer them. So, to bring the family peace, Jem ventures into the wilderness to find his brother and convince him to reconnect with his son.

Anemone is the feature debut of director Ronan Day-Lewis, the son of the great Daniel, and they wrote the film together. The elder Day-Lewis obviously believed in the project, as he came out of an eight-year retirement to play Ray. And he does so superbly, having not lost any of his acting power during the hiatus. As Jem, Sean Bean is solid, holding his own with the acting legend. Samantha Morton, as the wife and mother, is outstanding, but she – and especially Samuel Bottomley as Brian and Safia Oakley-Green as Brian’s friend – don’t have quite enough to do in the slightly underdeveloped screenplay.

Having a lot to do – and doing it well – is cinematographer Ben Fordesman, who elevates the film considerably. In addition, some mystical elements are introduced to lend the movie thematic heft, to limited success.

An anemone, also known as a windflower, has petals that are easily blown away in a breeze. The characters in Anemone also seem windblown, struggling for any kind of shelter they can find during the ungodly weather they face, both metaphorically and literally. But the real delicate flower here is the film itself, which is both exasperatingly slow and overly reliant on Day-Lewis. Depending upon your mood and your level of patience, the movie will either bloom for you or lose its petals one by one over 126 minutes of methodicality until all that remains is another wonderful performance by Day-Lewis but not much else.

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For more information on the movie, visit IMDB and Wikipedia. The film is currently in cinemas.