Anemone: The Sound of a Man Quietly Coming Apart
- Ben Sorensen
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
There are films that take their time. And then there’s Anenome, which takes its time the way a man who has never once talked about his feelings takes his time; slowly, quietly, occasionally with long silences that deafeningly speak volumes.
You’ve been warned.
Anemone is that film deeply uninterested in your comfort.
The first extraordinary thing about it is something that exists entirely outside the frame: this screenplay was written by Daniel Day-Lewis, eight years into his self-imposed retirement, alongside his son, Ronan, who also directs. Ronan's feature debut. Father and son, in a room, writing about fathers and sons. If you don't feel the weight of that before the film has even started, I can't help you.
The film follows Ray Stoker (Daniel Day-Lewis), a former British soldier who has retreated from the world entirely occupying a one-room stone cabin deep in the forests of northern England, unreachable by vehicle, surrounded by nature that Ronan and cinematographer Ben Fordesman shoot with the brooding menace of a supernatural horror film. The clouds press down. The trees close in. And Ray
exists inside all as a man who has decided that disappearing is the only honest thing left to do.
His brother Jem arrives at the cabin. Played by Sean Bean with a quiet, load-bearing stillness that is genuinely some of his best work, Jem has made the trek with a letter and a purpose: Ray's son Brian — the son Ray left behind — is struggling. He's young, angry, on a trajectory that looks uncomfortably familiar. Jem has come to drag his brother back into the world, or at least into conversation. And so two men who share everything and have said almost nothing sit in a cabin in the woods and slowly, painfully, begin to talk.
What follows is a film about what men do with the things that broke them. The Troubles in Northern Ireland sit in the background as context for Ray's trauma, the reason he left, the thing he cannot say but Anemone is less concerned with political history than with what that history costs a specific body, a specific family, across generations. The violence Ray carries isn't abstract. It came home with him. And then, because these things always do, it kept going.
The sound design deserves its own paragraph. Bobby Krlic — known as Haxan Cloak, the composer behind some of Ari Aster's most unsettling work — delivers a score that operates the way trauma does: intrusive, cyclic, arriving without permission. It's abrasive in the best possible sense, a post-rock and synth-drenched collision of nature and internal dread that makes the forest feel sentient and Ray's silences feel unbearable. When the score drops away entirely, the silence hits like a physical thing. It is, genuinely, one of the more visceral listening experiences you'll have in a cinema this year.
And then there is Daniel Day-Lewis.
Whatever you have heard, it is not an exaggeration. This is a performance of such lived-in, frightening specificity; the way Ray moves, the particular frequency of his anger, the humour that surfaces unexpectedly from somewhere under all that wreckage that you stop thinking about Daniel Day-Lewis entirely and simply accept Ray Stoker as a man who exists. Bookending the loud silences, there are monologues here that will be studied. Stories within stories that manage to be simultaneously electric, funny and devastating in a way that very few actors alive could pull off. His body, his hands, the way he sits in a room all deliberate and constant character work. It is, in the most straightforward possible terms, a great performance.
Bean, for his part, does something harder: he plays the man who listens. Jem through all his own trauma is present stoic strength, quiet, a wall of patient love for a brother who keeps swinging at him in a desperate attempt to feel, to express — and Bean makes every moment of that patience feel earned and costly. The film's best scenes belong to the two of them together, including an unexpected sequence where they dance, which somehow manages to be one of the most emotionally resonant moments in the whole film.
Samantha Morton and Samuel Bottomley, as Nessa and Brian, carry the film's parallel thread — the family Ray left behind, the cycle threatening to repeat itself in a son who has never met his father but has somehow absorbed his worst aspects anyway. The writing gives them less to work with than they deserve, and both actors do more with it than the material strictly earns. But their scenes provide necessary breath and context, and Morton in particular brings a grounded, understated grief to Nessa that the film leans on heavily in its second half.
Ronan Day-Lewis, as a debut director, is clearly not yet playing it safe and that is almost entirely a compliment. The film lurches occasionally into surrealism and expressionism that doesn't always land, and there are stretches where the pacing tests your patience in ways that feel less like deliberate restraint and more like a filmmaker still learning where the edges are. But the confidence behind the camera is real, the visual language is genuinely distinctive, and the willingness to sit inside discomfort rather than resolve it suggests a filmmaker with a very particular and valuable sensibility.
The title comes from the flowers growing outside Ray's cabin — the same kind his father once grew. In Greek mythology, the anemone is a flower of mourning. In this film, it becomes something slightly different: a symbol of what gets planted by one generation and keeps growing, stubbornly, in the next.
The film's central question is whether Brian will be the one to finally let it bloom into something other than grief.
A father and son wrote this together. Every scene of inherited silence carries the weight of something genuinely personal. This wasn't a writing exercise. This was therapy with a screenplay format.
Anemone is not a film for everyone and it knows it. It is cold, it is slow in places, and it demands that you meet it more than halfway. But what it's doing — pulling back the layers of male pain with genuine patience and craft, asking how much of what destroys us was handed to us by people who were also destroyed — is rare enough in cinema that the ambition alone earns considerable goodwill. And when it works, which is often, it is genuinely extraordinary.
Watch it in a good cinema if you can. Let the score do what it needs to do. And pay attention to the quiet moments between Ray and Jem — the ones where nothing is said and everything is communicated.
That's where the film actually lives.
Film Trigger Warning: This film explores themes of physical abuse, religious sexual abuse and war violence.
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