‘Anemone’ Review: A Haunting Story Of A Man At War With His Past

“I abandoned my child!” yelled three-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic 2008 drama There Will Be Blood , playing a charismatic but nonetheless sociopathic pursuant of the American dream in the California oil boom of the late 19 th -slash-early 20 th century. And now, in Anemone , here he is again, doing that exact same thing, but this time in the suburban north of 1980s/1990s England, in a much smaller film, albeit one that mines similar seams of fatherhood and toxic masculinity. And that’s not all; PTA casts an even longer shadow now — writing about Anemone , it’s hard not to think of his 1999 opus Magnolia and its recurrent mantra (“We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us”) when squaring up to Ronan Day-Lewis ’s