There’s no doubting Ronan Day-Lewis has an eye for cinematic composition. His debut film Anemone starring his father Daniel Day-Lewis, with Sean Bean, Samantha Morton, and Sean Bottomley looks striking and has abundant atmosphere. However, when it comes to the script penned by father and son the straining for authenticity is too obvious and tonally clumsy.
Set in the early 1990s, Brian (Sean Bottomley) is having a crisis after seriously beating another young man. He’s come home to his Sheffield house after going AWOL from the military and refuses to leave his room. His stepfather Jem (Sean Bean) has decided along with his mother Tessa (Samantha Morton) that what Brian requires is the presence of his father Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis). Jem is Ray’s brother, and he rides off to find Ray after a twenty-year estrangement.
Ray has been living in a secluded cabin in a forested part of Yorkshire and has made no effort to contact any of his family. His life is one of solitude (a cue given not only visually but by the music choice of ‘Solitude’ by Black Sabbath played by Ray). Only rumours exist as to why Ray cut himself off from people in general. Some have said he went mad on his third tour in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, others assume he’s in prison. Whatever the case he’s left a “huge sinkhole” in the lives of Tessa, Jem, and Brian. Brian has never met Ray Stoker and Jem believes he’s seeking “the invisible man… chasing the space” that Ray left in his life. If Jem can convince Ray to spend time with Brian, it might save him before he goes off the rails into depression and anger.
Ray, however, is a nest of thorns who has too much time to contemplate his rough and fractured life built around the violence of his father, the abuse he suffered at the hands of a priest at a care home, and the obvious PTSD from his time as a sargeant in the British army. He resents Jem’s ability to keep faith in God and to have come out of his own time in military service with fewer obvious scars. Ray spits at Jem, “You got me girl, you got me son, you got me life. Fuck off.”
Despite the plot being fairly rudimentary it’s difficult to gauge what the Day-Lewis’ are trying to convey with clarity. Shame and masculinity in crisis flowing through generations? The grace of being the person who “showed up”? Ray’s regrets? All of these things? Well, yes. Ray’s unending unresolved trauma is exhausting to witness even when it’s one of cinema’s greatest actors embodying it. Sean Bean seems to function as a witness who asks some very simple questions and patiently deals with his brother’s unpredictable moods.
Daniel Day-Lewis gives two stunning monologues (one involving a particularly scatalogical form of revenge) and reminds the audience of something they already knew—he’s a terrific performer. Yet even with the words that he and Ronan have written for his character being a script so intimate to the actor and director in its creation, there’s a sense that despite impressive literary lineages, neither is able to work with much more than literal meaning. The film over explains everything. The anemones around Ray’s rough cottage we are told are the flowers Stoker Snr. once planted. Tessa finally sits down with Brian and explains what she believes to be the reasons Ray left, so the audience is sitting with unnecessary repetition.
Ronan Day-Lewis also relies on fantasy and dream elements to shore up the “unconscious” needs and fears of Ray. They look impressive but promote the feeling that neither Ronan nor Daniel thinks the audience can understand what’s happening without them.
Where the film does make an impact is the use of colour and the gorgeous luminosity—some artificially created—of the natural environment of what is supposed to be South Yorkshire (Wales being a stand in). Ronan Day-Lewis has a flair for visual engagement that doesn’t quite cover his currently lacking narrative and tonal skill. Anemone might be a too large an undertaking for a first-time filmmaker, but it does showcase where Ronan’s instinctual strengths lie. Hopefully he can refine his writing if he chooses the writer/director path to a point where he values consistency and authenticity over grandiose set pieces which mire and weigh down the flow of the story.
Director: Ronan Day-Lewis
Cast: Sean Bean, Samuel Bottomley, Daniel Day-Lewis
Writers: Ronan Day-Lewis, Daniel Day-Lewis
Producers: Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner
Composer: Bobby Krlic
Cinematographer: Ben Fordesman
Editor: Nathan Nugent
Anemone is screening at the Russell Hobbs British Film Festival 2025.
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