Daniel Day-Lewis’s acting return in his son’s film turned my stomach

In his eight years away from the spotlight and acting, Sir Daniel Day-Lewis has lost none of his staggering talent, and Anemone suggests that may run in the family as it marks an assured feature film debut from his son.

Ronan Day-Lewis is in the director’s chair for this film, co-written with his dad, which explores the complicated ties between fathers, sons and brothers.

You can understand why Day-Lewis Sr would be tempted back into performing with this (although he disputes that he ever officially ‘retired’), but it’s also a film that isn’t for everyone.

Opening on a child’s drawings depicting the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Ronan Day-Lewis’s confident style and flair for playing with music is immediately established.

Daniel Day-Lewis and Sean Bean play estranged brothers, Ray and Jem, both of whom served in the British Army at the height of the conflict – and 20 years ago Ray fled to the forest to set up a life of solitude, off-grid.

But at the start of Anemone, Bean’s Jem sets off to find Ray and bring him home to his ex Nessa (Samantha Morton) and troubled son Brian (Samuel Bottomley); it transpires that he has stepped into his younger brother’s role with them both since Ray absconded.

That nobody speaks for the first 30 minutes or so of the film is deftly handled by Day-Lewis, as relationships and settings are established. It also allows his three-time best actor Oscar winner father, who was duly also nominated for his last film, Phantom Thread, to easily reintroduce himself to a global audience.

With his hand in frame holding an axe on Jem’s approach to his cabin, Day-Lewis is able to share a full emotional journey by simply adjusting his grip; he has lost none of his quiet power and precision in performance.

But Bean also holds his own against this screen legend as the more outgoing brother, who has found his solace in religion. They are totally believable as siblings, navigating twisted family dynamics and a complicated past, while Jem tries to reach Ray and convince him to return and meet his son.

Their relationship is loving but supressed and also sometimes intensely antagonistic. However, their longer exchanges can become frustrating as the dialogue in Anemone is uneven.

Sometimes it’s funny and rings true, like having a conversation about Ray’s used underwear (and giving Bean another of his classic ‘bastard’ utterances) before joking about God’s balls being the size of Canterbury Cathedral’s bells; it’s brotherly banter.

But it can also turn very dark, such as a stomach-churning anecdote about Ray priming himself with curry, booze and laxatives before defecating all over someone, going into detail over the consistency.

While it will go down in film history as one of Day-Lewis’s unhinged movie monologues, likely quoted, it’s also so unpleasant that it could easily lose people at this point – it certainly did at my screening during the London Film Festival. And I wish it wasn’t the part of the film I remembered so vividly.

For a man of few words, Day-Lewis’s Ray is also overwritten when he does speak with some of the phrasing abruptly out of place with what we’ve been shown and know of him as a character.

Morton and Bottomley are stuck with the half of the film that seems to tread water while Day-Lewis and Bean are grappling in the woods. Details of Brian’s situation surface slowly, while Nessa goes to work as an ambulance dispatcher and looks worried a lot.

Their patience, however, is eventually rewarded with a juicy confrontation over Ray and their feelings towards him, with Brian screaming in one of Anemone’s most resonant moments that his father is like ‘a giant [expletive] sinkhole in the middle of our lives’.

Anemone is ambitious and very well acted (unsurprisingly) as a film, but it gets lost in itself, stretching the story too thin at points over its 126-minute running time.

And while it’s clear that Day-Lewis (Jr) loves some strong visual metaphors, for every one that worked (a hailstorm of epic ice-rock proportions) there was also a bizarre choice, like the ghostly giant amoeba-like creature at the lake that comes far too close to the T-1000’s morphing and mimicking abilities in Terminator 2: Judgment Day for comfort.

The character’s motives and behaviour are not always clear enough to the audience either to allow for a fully satisfying film experience.

It is, however, a promising start from Ronan Day-Lewis and a welcome return for his father.

Anemone screened at the BFI London Film Festival on October 14, 16 and 19. It’s out in US cinemas now and will release in the UK on Friday, November 7.