Anemone Review: BFI London Film Festival 2025

Three time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis returns to acting with Anemone

Anemone marks a return for Daniel Day-Lewis – his first acting role in 8 years after previously announcing his retirement in 2017. Now, you might assume it would have taken an exceptionally good project to draw him back in, but that’s not quite the case – it was a family connection that did the job. Anemone is the debut feature from Daniel’s son, Ronan Day-Lewis, who both directs and writes – with his father credited as co-writer.

Jem (Sean Bean) heads off in search of his hermit brother Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis) whom he hasn’t seen in 20 years. Ray is living completely off-grid in a small cottage in the middle of the woods, leading a life of quiet discipline. Despite their current estrangement, Jem and Ray have a lot of shared history. They were both soldiers in the British Army and served in the turbulent 1970s of Northern Ireland, seeing both action and trauma that their families back in Sheffield could not understand.

On returning home from war, the two men became embroiled in a love triangle that resulted in the birth of Ray’s son Brian (Samuel Bottomley,) yet before the baby was born, Ray ran off in the night without a word to anyone about where he was going. Now, after countless questions and rumours, and spending 20 years raising his brother’s son as his own, Jem has tracked him down to find out the true story of what drove him away.

The first and only film I’ve seen at the London Film Festival that prompted a large number of walkouts from an audience – many of whom were literally being paid to be here – Anemone is a joyless slog. A torturous 2 hours that stretches out a simple plot that could have been resolved in a short film into a full feature. It could have cut at least half an hour were it not for the numerous overlong ‘arty’ zooms on characters standing around looking pensive while doing nothing in particular. The last 20 minutes also descend into bizarre, abstract scenes that don’t seem to have any purpose or connection to the rest of the plot.

Daniel Day-Lewis is emoting as well as he ever has, really trying to add depth to this story that feels like it was written by a fan fiction writer trying to slot in as much stereotypical traumatic backstory as possible. But the dialogue is often diabolical, characters delivering poorly written exposition that sticks out like a sore thumb as being unnatural. He and Bean exchange war stories, but they’re awkwardly told in a vernacular that’s clearly been written to appeal to and be easily understood by an audience, not in one of the two men would actually speak in. Despite his character supposedly not having spoken to anyone in 20 years and now recounting an incredibly painful story for the first time, he does it with a suspicious amount of poetic language.

An infuriating exercise in nepotism that seems unlikely to have seen the light of day were it not for the names involved, Anemone is the worst film I’ve seen in quite some time. It does have a few stunning visuals, and, at least we’ve got Daniel Day-Lewis back. We can only hope that working on this project inspires him to stick with acting and to return to form on better films.

Anemone is playing as part of the BFI London Film Festival. It will be released in UK cinemas on 7th November 2025

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