The trailer for Anemone doesn’t open so much as it surfaces, quiet, grey, and heavy. “All these years… the isolation…” Daniel Day-Lewis speaks as if exhaling for the first time in decades. No music yet. Just air. A life folded into silence.
Then the trailer breaks open in fragments, sharp cuts, confrontations, a fire flickering somewhere behind the eyes. This isn’t just a comeback. It’s a reckoning.
Day-Lewis plays Ray Stoker, a man who walked off into the Irish woods twenty years ago and never came back. His brother Jem calls him “The Invisible Man,” and in just a few lines, we’re caught between myth and memory, between a man’s vanishing and the lives that kept going in his absence. The voicework here is remarkable, low, guttural, lived-in. Day-Lewis doesn’t perform so much as dissolve into the role, making his return feel not triumphant, but necessary.
The trailer trades in atmosphere more than plot. That works in its favour. We’re shown long, bleak coastlines. Interiors full of disuse. A few seconds at sea, cold, wide, and unspeaking. That’s the rhythm: images that don’t explain, but suggest. The sea here isn’t metaphor, it’s weight. Depth without promise.
Brutality appears, but only in glimpses. No spectacle, no catharsis. Just impact and aftermath. There’s a line: “The war was the crime, and we were the phantom soldiers.” It sounds like something a man tells himself when no one else is listening.
Anemone is directed by Ronan Day-Lewis, Daniel’s son. His touch, at least as far as this trailer reveals, is confident and withholding. The editing is paced like memory, non-linear, associative. It trusts the audience to feel before knowing.
There’s risk in a trailer like this: it could come across as self-serious, even vague. But here, the restraint feels earned. There’s enough clarity to hold interest, a family fractured, a man returning from psychological exile, but not enough to offer comfort. The emotional terms are difficult. There’s no promise that any of these resolves.
If the film holds what the trailer hints at, raw familial history, male vulnerability without sentiment, and a refusal to moralize war — Anemone may not be an easy watch. But it might be an essential one.
