'Anemone' brings Daniel Day-Lewis back in from the cold

It’s been eight years since Daniel Day-Lewis announced his retirement from acting and said he wanted to “explore the world in a different way.” But the big-screen absence of the actor many would peg as the greatest one alive ends with “Anemone,” a new film directed by his son, Ronan Day-Lewis. The two of them wrote it together. What began as something small, with no real ambition, grew until a full feature film and Day-Lewis’ long-awaited return to movies.

- Associated Press

“It saddened me that I had perhaps ruled myself out of that when I decided to work on something else for a while,” Day-Lewis said in an interview alongside his son.

“As we progressed through it, and it seemed less and less possible to contain it, like two fellas in a shed, it began to alarm me slightly. I understood that this was going to involve the full paraphernalia of a film production, and that wasn’t something I was eager to get back into.”

“Anemone,” which recently premiered at the New York Film Festival and which Focus Features releases on Friday in theatres, finds Day-Lewis, now 68, not even slightly less intense or magnetic a performer. It’s a father-son story, though not an autobiographical one. Day-Lewis stars as Ray Stoker, a solitary hermit living in a remote cabin. His brother, Jem (Sean Bean), arrives and tries to convince him to return to his teenage son.