After starring in some of the most iconic movies of the last 40 years – Gangs of New York, There Will Be Blood, The Age of Innocence – Daniel Day-Lewis retired after 2017’s Phantom Thread. Perhaps the most famous of the method actors, his commitment to the bit – three years in the gym for The Boxer, weeks in a wheelchair for My Left Foot, learning how to make a canoe for Last of the Mohicans – left him feeling “hollowed out”.
So it was with some surprise – and a few raised eyebrows – that he announced his return last year, to co-write and star in Anemone, directed by none other than his son, Ronan Day-Lewis. Is this another masterclass from one of the finest actors of his generation or a cynical exercise in nepotism? It is, in truth, a bit of both.
Day-Lewis Sr is now fully grey and sports a biker-style handlebar moustache, making him look a bit like the ex-footballer Graeme Souness. He plays Ray Stoker, a former soldier living in self-imposed exile – not unlike the actor playing him – in a cabin somewhere in a Yorkshire forest. His life of self-sufficient solitude is interrupted when his brother Jem (played by the world’s most Yorkshire Yorkshireman, Sean Bean) hikes through the wilderness armed with only coordinates and a message to deliver: the son Ray has never met needs his help.
The story, such as it is, is sparse and reveals itself slowly. The brothers both served in Northern Ireland. They saw things. They did things. It is, appropriately, a film concerned with father-son relationships. The brothers bond, through a series of regional grunts, over recollections of their violent father. Now Ray’s own son appears to be repeating the cycle.
Given this is Ronan’s first feature, he displays a keen directorial eye. Not much happens and not much is said, so Anemone relies upon its visuals. And there are some strikingly beautiful sequences: Ray’s hut is a captivating mix of bucolic fairytale and drab realism, and the Yorkshire countryside is captured in all its sombre, windswept glory.
Things are taken up a notch when a magical realist element is introduced; a hailstorm of biblical proportions reminded me of the ‘raining frogs’ scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.
Would Day-Lewis have taken this gig were his son not at the helm? Not in a million years. Is it great to see him back regardless? It sure is.
• Anemone is playing as part of the London Film Festival