I have seen a few reviews which called this film “utterly joyless” and “couldn’t see a reason for making it.” What they have (somehow) failed to realize is that the joy is in the shape of the thing—in its lilt and line and lifting. The beauty is in the thing itself—its shine and shadow and shivering. That its reason is every shot that cuts away too soon and the exact lyric where a song cuts in. It is about how the past is a photograph with a given frame of sight. It is about cycles of male violence and female silence. The lines wrinkled into old men’s earlobes.
Clearly, this movie interacted with the poet in me more than the critic. It is one of those films—like Magnolia, The Fountain, The Green Knight, Godland—that holds its imagery in a buoyancy of intuitive logic…that can’t be parsed and mapped and lectured. Written by Daniel Day-Lewis and his son, Ronan Day-Lewis. Directed by Ronan. Starring Daniel, Sean Bean, and Samantha Morton. At first it seems oh so Irish, with pederast priests and the IRA…but it becomes something beautifully universal in its patchwork particulars: a keening for healing written in the elements and the unhearable explosion of return. (It also is about growing up as the son of a maniacally devoted Method actor.)
Don’t learn about it. Don’t look it up. The film reveals itself to you in its own way and time, and it deserves that privilege. Just know that all cards are on the table. And dice. And rubber bands. And robins’ eggs. In other words, everything is fair game, and it does not want to be interrogated but empathized with. But I wish you had already seen it. I want to talk to you about it. I want to ask, “Did you see—?” “Do you think—?” “Did you feel like you had suddenly started weeping when—?”
With a moody score, unearthly photography, and play-like monologues, Anemone is about the senselessness of destruction and our addiction to the same. It is also about bringing beauty into the world, even among the ugliest parts, for no reason but that that is where the joy lives.