The broken man at the center of the British drama “Anemone” isn’t physically large, yet he towers over this modest movie. A recluse who lives in a small house in thick woods, he has a lean body and a helmet of close-cropped hair that suggest disciplined austerity or perhaps a military background. You sense the tension in him and see it too in the deliberation of his gestures and bearing; he looks like he’s trying to keep something wild at bay. Mostly, he towers because he’s played by Daniel Day-Lewis, who’s returned to the screen eight years after announcing his retirement from acting. He was 60, and said he was done.
He has returned with “Anemone,” a family affair both behind and in front of the camera. He wrote the script with his son Ronan Day-Lewis, who also directed. It’s a visually rich, flawed drama about fathers, violence, pain and love that largely takes place in present-day Northern England. Daniel plays Ray, a former British soldier who many years earlier ran off, including from his pregnant wife. Ray’s reasons for withdrawing from the world gradually emerge amid a lot of emotional bloodletting in a movie that periodically spikes its realism with moments of surrealism. The whole thing is most persuasive when nothing is explained.
The movie opens on a lightly enigmatic note with a man you come to know as Ray’s brother, Jem (Sean Bean), roaring into the story on his motorcycle. The anxious woman who says goodbye to him is his partner, Nessa (Samantha Morton), whose personality is telegraphed by her worried face; Morton’s marginal role, in turn, is foreshadowed by her few words. Inside the house, their son, Brian (Samuel Bottomley), is hunkered down in his room. His knuckles are skinned, and his feeling are raw. Nobody here speaks much at first, though once Jem arrives at Ray’s house and the booze begins flowing, so does everyone’s pain and hurt.
Ronan Day-Lewis is a painter, and he immediately seizes your attention with the clarity and somber beauty of his images. Given his fine arts background, he is unsurprisingly sensitive to light and color, and understands the effect of natural landscapes on the soul. Much of the movie seems to have been shot on overcast days, which makes the colors — the forest green, the white flowers, the deep-ocean blue and blood red of some of Ray’s clothing — pop beautifully. Working with his cinematographer, Ben Fordesman, he uses the widescreen frame to turn details into statements as well as to suggest the expansiveness of the world.
Less successful are some of the filmmaker’s unexplained, near-hallucinatory visions that seem to haunt Ray, like the pale, luminescent creature with a U-shaped body and humanoid face that is abruptly dropped in. It’s a curious totem, and its body’s arc echoes the frowning lines of Ray’s mustache. This figure has appeared in some of Ronan Day-Lewis’s fine-art work. At best, its presence here and that of other strange sights (a dreamy visitor, a monstrous fish) seem like attempts to insert quasi-Lynchian mystery into the movie. The problem is that these sights don’t offset or comment on — much less pierce — the veil of what passes for everyday ordinary life. The images don’t trouble the realism; they just distract.
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