SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains light spoilers for Anemone. If you have not yet seen the film and don’t want to know anything about it before doing so, proceed at your own risk!
It should surprise exactly nobody that Daniel Day-Lewis delivers one of the most earth-shaking performances of 2025 in Anemone – his return to the big screen after eight years of retirement – but I nonetheless found myself shaken by one particular monologue in the movie’s second act. Early in the reunion between Day-Lewis’ Ray and Jem (his brother played by Sean Bean), the former tells a story that is so tragic and disgusting that I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. It’s such a staggering emotional tightrope walk of a kind that I’ve rarely experienced, and I thus felt compelled to ask about it specifically later that week while interviewing the film’s co-writer/director.
I spoke with Ronan Day-Lewis (who is Daniel Day-Lewis’ son) along with Sean Bean virtually during the recent press day for Anemone, and I told the pair how conflicted I was while watching the scene unfold. I asked about how the filmmaker went about crafting the immensely complex scene, and he explained that it was most definitely the intention to both make you chuckle and then feel horrible for doing so. He told me,
Yeah, I think that kind of feeling of your feet not touching the ground and the humor – but then making you laugh, but then punishing you for laughing was always kind of a part of the scene. And it emerged pretty early on for us and became a pretty good tonal sort of barometer actually for the overall film. You realize more and more how genuinely bleak and just terrible the thing is that he's recounting to Jem and what it implies and in his history and their shared history. But it's done in this way where you're never quite sure like where you lie, like tonally with the film.
(I’m about to describe the scene in discussion here, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet and have a sensitive stomach, you may want to click away to another one of our wonderful articles here on CinemaBlend)
The monologue sees Ray recounting to Jem his experience reuniting with their childhood priest – who invited him into his home without recognizing him. Ray told the elderly church leader that he was there for a collection, but it was actually a ruse for revenge. To get back at the priest for repeated encounters of sexual abuse, he filled his stomach with a mix of Guiness, curry, and laxatives, and after seducing the priest into submission, he proceeded to defacate all over his face.
It’s “funny” in the extreme scatalogical sense, but the context in which everything is wrapped is immensely horrible and traumatic. Hence, even if you let yourself smile, you ultimately feel awful for it.
As Ronan Day-Lewis described, it’s a hyper-focused dose of the emotional punch that Anemone carries as a whole – but he also noted that it is also a reflection of the relationship between the two brothers at the center of the story. Like the monologue, they run extremely hot and cold. Said the writer/director,
Then also like with the character in terms of the dynamic between Gem and Ray, there's this kind of constant volatility – which is also where the silences come into play – where there's this constantly kind of shifting power dynamic, and they vault between laughter and wanting to kill each other within seconds. And I thought that was something that was very true also to just the brotherhood experience.
While I don’t personally have a brother, I do have a sister, and I feel it very much reflects the sibling experience.
Also starring Samantha Morton, Samuel Bottomley, and Safia Oakley-Green, Anemone is now playing in theaters – and while the film has gotten a mixed response, if you find reading about the monologue even moderately staggering, you’ll be blown away by Daniel Day-Lewis’ remarkable performance.
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