Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (December 21, 2025)
After more than 35 years as one of the most acclaimed film actors of all-time, Daniel Day-Lewis retired in 2017. He made Phantom Thread his final movie.
Well, I guess Day-Lewis meant it at the time. However, eight years later the chance to collaborate with his son Ronan coaxed Daniel back in front of the cameras.
Retired military veteran Jem Stoker (Sean Bean) leaves behind his wife Nessa (Samantha Morton) and son Brian (Simon Bottomley) to embark on a mission. He heads into the hidden corners of Ireland to reconnect with his estranged and isolated brother Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis).
The brothers share a complicated past and Jem wants to reconcile. The Stoker boys discuss their history and attempt to find a path forward.
While I didn’t particularly care for it, Phantom Thread received enough critical plaudits to feel like a suitable conclusion to Daniel Day-Lewis’s career. It got six Oscar nominations – including Best Picture - and Day-Lewis got his sixth Best Actor nod, though he lost to Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour.
Will Oscar pick Day-Lewis a seventh time for Anemone? Perhaps, since he maintains immense name value as a great actor.
However, Anemone came and went without much of a dent, as the movie found little audience. Given it also earned mediocre reviews, I won’t feel surprised if the Academy ignores Day-Lewis’s return to the screen.
Whatever flaws I find in Anemone, they don’t come from the actors. This doesn’t become one of Daniel’s best performances, but I don’t fault him for that.
Instead, the script lets down Daniel, Bean and the rest. Anemone feels more like a calling card than a fully realized film.
Ronan Day-Lewis’s feature debut, Anemone feels like a first film. Although Ronan doesn’t go bonkers with cinematic flash, he nonetheless relies on a few visual techniques to do all the work for him.
In addition to some of the usual shakycam, Ronan loves his dollies. The camera dollies in! The camera dollies out!
Lather, rinse, etc. A little of this goes a long way, and Ronan’s inability to find more creative – or at least less tedious – photographic choices grows tiresome.
As does much of the rest of Anemone. The story takes forever to actually give us any information and by the time it does, we probably don’t care.
I can embrace a “slow burn” narrative but it needs to build in an evocative manner. Anemone doesn’t, as its opening act simply feels like padding.
Once the “plot” actually kicks in, matters don’t really improve, partly because the situation remains vague. Anemone fails to get to the heart of the elements until roughly its mid-point, and an hour just seems like a long time to wait.
Even when the movie finally pushes actual exposition, it seems less than compelling. Anemone leans toward melodrama in its choices and these render the developments borderline silly.
I suspect Daniel did the movie mainly to help kickstart Ronan’s career. I can’t imagine he would’ve worked on such a thin and overbaked project like this otherwise.
That said, Daniel deserves some of the blame since he created the script with Ronan. Anemone exists as Daniel’s only screenwriting credit.
If this shows Daniel’s skills in that area, I urge him not to quit his day job. Granted, I don’t know how much of the text came from Daniel or from Ronan, but the script exists as little more than a collection of monologues in search of compelling characters.
Which makes me half wonder if Daniel did Anemone to help his son but also to set himself up for that seventh Academy Award nomination. Given all the times the movie grinds to a halt so Ray can embark on a long speech, this feels like a classic example of a part that exists primarily as Oscar bait.
And maybe that will work, as Daniel’s name remains noteworthy enough that Academy voters might just nominate him out of reflex. Again, the actor does what the role requires, so I can’t criticize his performance.
Unfortunately, Daniel’s work simply serves a thin and tedious story with thin and tedious characters. Not much about this slow and contrived film succeeds.
