Tripwire Reviews UK Drama Anemone Starring Sean Bean and Daniel Day-Lewis

Soldiers Of Misfortune

Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows reviews UK drama Anemone, starring Sean Bean and Daniel Day-Lewis…

Anemone
Director: Rowan Day-Lewis
Stars: Sean Bean, Samuel Bottomley, Daniel Day-Lewis

Eight years after he appeared in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread and ‘retired’ from cinema, Daniel Day-Lewis returns in a film directed by his son Rowan and co-written by Day-Lewis.

Anemone is a strange film: Despite the presence of Bean (Jem) and Day-Lewis (Ray) as estranged brothers in a northern English town, united by a past tragedy, it feels like a very flat affair. The pair were soldiers in the British army and this is what gives them the aforementioned bond. But it’s a story that we have seen countless times before and in spite of the chemistry between the central protagonists and a competent albeit unremarkable directing debut from Rowan Day-Lewis, Amenone isn’t a particularly engaging film.

The plot sees the brothers drawn into an emotional web with Bottomley at its core. He plays Ray’s natural son Brian, who was adopted by Jem when his brother disappeared to go and live in the wilderness in the north many years ago. He lives with Ray’s ex-girlfriend Nessa, played by Samantha Morton.

Day-Lewis is still a very powerful onscreen presence and Bean shows that he does have surprising range as an actor but Anemone is a well made but ultimately empty experience. Its surreal scene very near the end of the film, which doesn’t fit in with the rest of it, only serves to throw the viewer out of the watching experience.

Before he ‘retired’, Day-Lewis left quite a legacy as an actor and Anemone doesn’t really add a great deal to that body of work.

Anemone is out in UK cinemas now.