"Anemone:" Too Little, Too Late.

In 2017, legendary actor Daniel Day-Lewis starred in Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread, his last film before going into retirement. The news that he would no longer appear on screen came as a devastating blow to millions of film lovers, but luckily for them, this retirement would be short lived. This year's New York Film Festival saw the release of his latest project, Anemone, which he co-wrote with his son, Ronan, who served as the film's director. But after debuting with a shockingly low score of 54% on Rotten Tomatoes and having one of the worst box office openings of 2025, what was meant to be Daniel Day-Lewis' triumphant return to the screen has turned out to be another one of his extremely rare failures. But is it deserving of this devastating fate?

Sitting down for a midnight screening of Anemone, felt like the perfect environment to understand the isolation and natural world that belongs to both main characters, Ray and Jem, playd by Daniel Day-Lewis and Sean Bean. But despite the immersive environment, the film's many faults soon began to show. Anemone tries to balance too many surrealistic concepts at once; visions of guilt, grief, and fractured memory form without ever developing to the fullest extent, this also unfortunately applies to the characters.

Silence is the main language utilized in the film. Many scenes include long pauses followed alongside even longer gazes. As the film stretches on, that same silence becomes repetitive, more numbing than artistic. You start to feel trapped in the quiet rather than be moved by it. And even when we are moved by these psychological sequences that use audio as a way to keep us engaged, it’s nothing more than a tool instead of an extension of the characters themselves. In general, the film’s emotional weight is distributed between the two brothers alongside mother and son, a dynamic that serves more as a way to provide conflict than to be an additional emotional layer. 

I will say that I was enraptured by these beautiful monologues performed by Daniel Day-Lewis who can sustain the flame in his expression every time, yet I ended being reminded of how it existed within a vacuum. It never pierces the void or gives the audience a new perspective because that state is simply not developed enough.

My personal appreciation for Ronan Day-Lewis’ stems from how he captures genuine familial ache and tension, allowing for the two main actors to establish a deeper relationship with one another slowly throughout its runtime. However, the film mistakes distance for depth. Silence alone isn’t going to communicate pain, longing stares don’t always equate to sadness and surrealist fragments don’t automatically translate to trauma either. The emotional throughline could have been a lot better developed.

Throughout the film I couldn't help but be reminded of Jesse Eisenberg's A Real Pain. A film that while being much lighter and comedic in tone, also uses its ensemble of characters as mirrors, where each side character reflects and challenges the flaws of its central pair. Anemone, in contrast, isolates everything: its setting, its characters, its emotion. That isolation will always give them space, but it’s pointless if they’re so underwritten, that it feels like they’re floating in the midst of it all. Even when the world around them is frightening and it's most interesting through the stormy weather by its climax, it just feels like it’s too little, too late.

Ultimately, this isn’t to say that Ronan Day-Lewis had nothing to say about the consequences of separating oneself from family as a way to heal from the traumas of the past. Yet the moments that express that theme don’t feel as earned as I wish they were. In a movie where dreams keep up haunted characters, where we see broken people make harsher choices and where strokes of emotional depth come out, there needs to be more spoken, not less.