Anemone: a welcome return from Daniel Day-Lewis

In Ronan Day-Lewis’s first feature, Daniel Day-Lewis plays a former British soldier, Ray, who has exiled himself to a cabin in the wilderness. The setting nearly provides a description of the film in toto, the legendary actor giving us a private masterclass in portraying grief, rage and everything else that’s grown over his love for his family, like moss overrunning a tree. The dramatic structure is minimal, suggesting a black box play more than a feature film: Ray’s brother, Jem (Sean Bean), treks to Ray’s hideaway in a kind of one-man intervention, trying to bring this taut-nerved man back to the wife, Nessa (Samantha Morton), he left behind, pregnant, years ago. Back home Nessa, in a parallel outreach, slowly opens up to their sullen teenage son (Samuel Bottomley) about his father’s still-stinging absence.

Ronan Day-Lewis and his cinematographer Ben Fordesman (who shot Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding, 2023) effectively set up Ray’s woodland surroundings with an off-the-grid ruggedness and occasional touches of otherworldly artifice. In his hand-built hideaway, the volatile military veteran Ray backs into reckoning with his past, going from a shaggy-dog story about “manuring” a paedophile priest to moshing with Jem to eventually breaking down in a seaside scene over what he did and saw in Northern Ireland.

Watching Daniel Day-Lewis throughout feels like glimpsing someone in public in the aftermath of a fight or a cry; he bristles with the real. But the film founders thanks to weaknesses on other fronts: a dramatic structure of revelation that’s simply not enough (or complicated sufficiently) for a feature; a reliance on visual habits (slow zooms on tableaux, like an iPhone memories montage) that seem intended to focus tension but instead stop it short; and a pulsating guitar soundtrack (Jesus and Mary Chain et al) that goes from entrancing to underlining what’s repetitive in the film.

The screenplay, co-written by son-and-father Ronan and Daniel Day-Lewis, also tends to make the mother-son scenes basic compared to Ray’s. Bean, too, though nodding to his series Broken (2017), is constrained by an essentially prompting role, to the extent that I was surprised when, at the New York Film Festival press conference, the team said the story was primarily about brotherhood. Who could resist casting long-absent Daniel Day-Lewis given the chance? But the film’s surprise flourishes of magic realism (echoing Ronan Day-Lewis’s artwork) and air of foreboding suggest the director may yet have an intriguing future in the realms of genre.

► Anemone is in UK cinemas 7 November.