On Screen: “Anemone”

Anemone

An “Anemone” is a buttercup-like flower, and the new film that bears its name is a grim character study of a victim of “The Troubles” that plagued Northern Ireland for so many years. It boasts two brilliant performances in search of a plot.

Co-written by Daniel Day-Lewis and his son Ronan Day-Lewis, making his directing debut, it revolves around tortured Ray Stoker (Daniel Day-Lewis), who abandoned his pregnant wife Nessa (Samantha Morton) and retreated off-the-grid for the past 20 years, living like a hermit in a ramshackle cabin deep in the woods.

Suddenly one day, Ray’s estranged brother Jem (Sean Bean) appears, bringing news from Nessa that Ray’s bruised, bullied teenage son Brian (Samuel Bottomley) has gone AWOL from the military, so Nessa is begging Ray to come home.

Visually, several mystically primordial scenes are absolutely stunning, captured by cinematographer Ben Fordesman. Experimental, even surreal at times, particularly when there’s an austere abstraction that resembles a water horse, followed by a huge, gutted fish — and climaxing with a hailstorm of Biblical proportions.

Problem is: the story — a.k.a. plot — is almost non-existent so it’s all about the actors who try desperately to hold your attention for 125 minutes.

There’s a particularly gross set-up in which Ray graphically details his scatological revenge against a pedophile priest — a lengthy speech that perhaps qualifies as the cinema’s most disgusting monologue.

All of which amounts to Daniel Day-Lewis’s less-than-remarkable return to the screen after an absence of eight years, evoking memories of his performances in “My Left Foot,” “The Crucible,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “Lincoln,” “There Will Be Blood,” and “Phantom Thread.”

FYI: 27 year-old Ronan Day-Lewis’s mother is Rebecca Miller, daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and his third wife, photographer Inge Morath.