Anemone Review

Ronan Day-Lewis was a painter first, and his debut shows it in both directions. Ray Stoker has been holed up in a shack in the woods of northern England for twenty years when his brother Jem arrives with a rucksack and a request, and Sean Bean quietly gives the better performance, because he has to carry whole scenes on decency and nerves while his co-star withholds. When Ray finally opens up about what he did as a soldier during the Troubles, the writing goes slack in the exact place it needed to be hardest, and the horror gets described rather than felt.

The images are the reason to sit through it. Rain on a hillside shot in flat grey, a single lamp in a filthy interior, a dream insert where the frame turns molten and painted; Ben Fordesman finds textures most first features never reach for. Samantha Morton, handed maybe fifteen minutes, does more with one kitchen argument than the whole middle hour. But a script that hoards its secret this long owes you something bigger when it opens the box, and the surreal detours read less like vision than like a young director proving he has one.