“Explores trauma, guilt, and reconciliation through an emotionally charged lens.”

Over the past year, I’ve been struck by how often fatherhood appears on screen – nearly every fourth film I watch seems to circle back to it. Looking at this year’s NYFF Main Slate, several titles featured fathers desperately searching for their daughters, whether physically or emotionally: Jay Kelly, Sirat, Sentimental Value. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another adds to the list, following an overprotective father on a chaotic chase to rescue his child. Ronan Day-Lewis’ debut feature, Anemone, approaches the subject from a different angle. The most obvious father-son relationship, of course, is embedded in the film’s making itself: Daniel Day-Lewis’ long-awaited return to the screen, in a project directed by his son after what was announced as his definitive retirement following Phantom Thread (2017).

A Spotlight selection at this year’s NYFF, Anemone was met with a mixture of skepticism and curiosity. Set in Northern England, the film follows two estranged brothers – Ray (Day-Lewis) and Jem (Sean Bean) – who reunite after decades apart. Their encounter unfolds in the lingering aftermath of political and personal violence that shaped their shared past. Co-written by father and son, Anemone explores trauma, guilt, and reconciliation through an emotionally charged lens.

From the beginning, the film is difficult to watch – its persistent close-ups and abrasive sound design feel almost punitive. The score grows repetitive, with musical interludes that translate nature’s violence into expressions of inner demons. Ghosts are constantly being unearthed, ruling over a world incapable of escaping its past. The hermit Ray, after years in hiding, is being asked by Jem to return and meet his grown son. Jem has effectively raised the boy, who now acts out in bursts of violence that everyone attributes to his father’s absence. The tapestry of intergenerational trauma begins to unravel, and it becomes increasingly hard to look away. As spectators, we’re drawn into the family’s dysfunction – forced, like them, to bear witness.

At the NYFF press conference, both director and actor spoke of brotherhood as the film’s emotional core. Yet fatherhood feels just as central. In his first extended monologue Ray reveals his repulsion toward paternal figures: the abuse inflicted by his father and, later, by a priest. He recounts his revenge in grotesque, scatological terms – a moment that exposes how deeply he associates authority with violence. His self-imposed exile, understood as protection for his son, has in fact caused the greatest harm.

Much of the film’s power comes from what it withholds. Only late in the story does Ray reveal a war crime he committed decades earlier, reframing everything that came before. For once, Anemone looks at the Troubles not from a collective or mythic distance but from the intimate vantage of a perpetrator haunted by memory. The confession ties private guilt to national history: the family secret becomes an allegory for the silences that shape a country. I was compelled to see it through, invested in this tension between personal and political trauma. It makes sense that Ronan’s generation would be the first to confront this material head-on; collective violence often demands decades of amnesia before it can be spoken. “How much do you know about the Troubles in Northern Ireland?” Nessa, the boy’s mother, asks him. This question seems to echo across generations.

Religion threads through the story as both shield and weapon, used to justify or conceal acts of abuse, torture, and murder. The Troubles themselves, ultimately a territorial conflict, were long cloaked by sectarian language, using religion as a way to further mark differences between Catholics and Protestants. In the film’s climax, hail the size of golf balls crashes down from the sky, shattering glass and cars in both town and forest. The biblical imagery here, evoking plague and punishment, renders visible the film’s subtext: a world where divine wrath and historical guilt converge.

The title, Anemone, refers to the flowers growing outside Ray’s cabin in the woods. Jem asks if they’re the same kind their father once grew in the garden. In Greek myth, the anemone symbolizes death and mourning which in this case becomes a delicate bloom bearing the weight of collective grief. Just as Ray must confront his own ghosts, we too are summoned to listen to this rarely told British perspective. Healing, the film suggests, is impossible until the silence is broken. Ray’s son, himself a soldier, resents his father’s absence; his rage mirrors the unprocessed trauma of a nation. Perhaps that’s what drew me most to the film: its insistence that fatherhood, however fraught, is the point where history finally demands acknowledgment.