The headline story with Anemone is that Daniel Day-Lewis has been coaxed back into the limelight, albeit by someone close to home: his own son Ronan, the film's writer-director. (Cinephiles with long memories will recall that DDL warmed up for There Will Be Blood by appearing in 2005's The Ballad of Jack and Rose, written and directed by his wife - and RDL's mother - Rebecca Miller.) An intriguing subplot is that Anemone pairs DDL, widely regarded as the greatest actor of his generation, with Sean Bean, a sometimes mocked, much-imitated small-screen regular who in recent years has come to assume a craggy gravitas via such heavyweight projects as Jimmy McGovern's Time. It's a sign of the place Bean now occupies in the thespian landscape that he should have been cast as DDL's onscreen equal, the Abel to his Cain, in a film that imagines a distinctly unusual reunion between brothers: deep in the woods, after many long years apart. In Anemone's opening scenes, we may struggle to see the forest for the trees: RDL is very deliberate in setting up the mystery of why these two men are reuniting, why here and why now. But the specifics are compelling enough. Bean's Jem leaves a family behind him to go on this hike, his Biblical tattoos indicating this is a man who's known both struggle and God in his time. We intuit that DDL's Ray has become a hermit of sorts long before he cues up Black Sabbath's "Solitude" - the world is a lonely place/you're on your own - to reaffirm his lifestyle choices. Ray is fiercely protective of this self-imposed isolation, picking up an axe when he hears footsteps approaching. Almost as eloquent, though, is his very next gesture: upon realising the intruder is his own kin, Ray mutely sets the axe down and puts the kettle on.
It's hard not to be drawn in. Here are two men from very different places, played by actors from utterly distinct worlds, who've reached a point in their lives and careers where they're comfortable to sit with and in silence; over these two hours, their task will be to make the internal external and return the past to the present-day. Anemone proceeds to monitor a growing tension between inside and out: the cabin in the woods, at one point presented as the kind of bisected cutaway one might see in a picturebook a father might well have gifted his son; polite society versus its wild-and-woollier fringes. It's very much there in a violently scatological anecdote Ray tells Jem about the vengeance he wrought on the priest who abused him during his care-home childhood. To reach for a summary the God-fearing Jem might appreciate, RDL is needling away at that fine line that separates that done to us from that we do unto others. So it's male violence, then, and male trauma: Ray, one of the recent cinema's few properly convincing hardmen, proves to be as affected - and as damaged - by his upbringing as he is by his time as a British squaddie in the Troubles. Cue one more moment to add to the long rollcall of onscreen DDL genius: after Jem asks what happened over there, Ray at first responds with an unnervingly long glare, either to suggest his brother knows full well what happened, or that he can't or doesn't feel the need to put his experiences into words. The film isn't exclusively about male suffering, though. From time to time, RDL cuts back to the homefront, less loaded with bristling testosterone, but in many ways every bit as fraught. Here, we meet Jem's wife Nessa (Samantha Morton, unravelling as only Sam Morton can), who has a complicated relationship of her own with the brothers, and her teenage son Brian (Samuel Bottomley, from Ladhood and How to Have Sex) who has himself started to drift off the rails, as his scraped knuckles and frequent crying jags testify.
For an hour or so, I marvelled at RDL's efforts to connect everything, to repair even the most irreparably broken bond: we may even wonder whether the aggrieved biker who yells at Nessa on a pelican crossing is the subject of the 999 call she's later heard taking in her control-room day job. (The first and final images similarly synch.) Somewhere out there, there's a version of Anemone that is all empty posturing: I say this with some certainty, having sat through several variants over the past few decades. As the version we've got proceeds, we get glimpses of this bizarro-world Anemone: a living-room sitdown between mother and son that - hampered by clunky crosscutting - never catches fire and seems to go on for a small eternity, Ray using words and phrases ("concussive", "full measure of suffering") this actor and director might well reach for, but this character almost certainly wouldn't. The second half exposes the extent to which RDL deploys the monologue as a tactic, either to attract actors or to bring the audience up to speed. The overcast skies, vivid though they are, seem to leach into the drama - suddenly it's all brooding, all of the time - and it hardly helps that the coup de cinéma that intervenes has been half-inched from another film (a modern classic, indeed) on more or less the same theme. The Anemone we have peaks around its midpoint, with a scene that finds Ray and Jem making a rare excursion to civilisation in the form of a quiet pub: no strain, no wobbles, no fuss, just two taciturn men in their natural environment, going back-and-forth over a bag of cheese-and-onion crisps. Here, as elsewhere, RDL finds expressive and surprising ways to flesh out and fill these spaces and silences. It must be a heck of a thing to be able to get your much-laurelled dad to appear in your film about fathers and sons - that's a privilege, yes. But the sincerity with which this filmmaker sets about his own task, the risks he takes, and his eye for the natural world (no Brooklyn Beckham, this) all bode well for the future.
Anemone is now playing in selected cinemas.
