ANEMONE** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 7

ANEMONE is a decent three and half star 95 minute drama trapped inside  a dour, dull two hour plus two-star film. It's all style over substance, as if a blue colour palette, smash-cuts to super-loud music and super-slow push-ins on Daniel Day-Lewis' face can make up for a lack of plot progression.

Here's what we learn at painstakingly slow pace over the first hour and a quarter:  Jem (Sean Bean) and Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis) are ex-British soldiers raised by a harsh father. Ray was sexually abused by a priest as a child and having knocked-up his girlfriend Nessa (Samantha Morton), ran off to live off-grid in Yorkshire and has never seen his son Brian (Samuel Bottomley).  Nessa then raised Brian with Jem, and they are profoundly religious, whereas Roy remains angry at the Church.  The events of the film are kicked into gear when Brian goes absent without leave from the Army, having kicked the shit out of another boy. He has suffered taunts about Roy his whole life and now appears deeply depressed and withdrawn. Nessa asks Roy to finally connect with Brian and prevent any further harm. 

The two lead actors are good although Sean Bean only really gets any lines after an hour, and DDL is mostly emoting in big fat sweary monologues. Poor Sam Morton is definitely in a "kind empathetic girl" role. The most perplexing bit of casting or perhaps directing is that of Samuel Bottomley as Brian.  Sean Bean's Jem describes him as a natural and charismatic leader with heft to spare. I know the character is deeply depressed when we first meet him but there is no sense that this is something he is capable of.

Overall this is a pretty turgid film that wants to seem important but is just way too long and too formal and too self-important for its content. Such a shame and such a waste of a DDL performance.

ANEMONE is rated R and has a running time of 121 minutes. It was released in the USA on October 3rd.

THE THING WITH FEATHERS**** - Berlin Film Festival 2025

Whether or not you enjoy writer-director Dylan Southern's new film THE THING WITH FEATHERS will probably depend on how far you buy into his visual rendering of the high concept at the heart of the beautiful book upon which it was based.  Because novelist Max Porter chooses to tell the story of a grieving widower and his two small sons by imagining their grief as a large black crow who pokes, prods and even punches them into accepting their devastating loss.  What can be imagined from the page often appears clunky or laughable on screen and I was desperately worried that seeing a man-sized crow with a thick Northern accent wouldn't work. But I am delighted to say that for me, at least, it really did.

I found myself deeply engaged with this small family in its brutal fight for survival.  Benedict Cumberbatch is in almost every scene and perfectly embodies a dad who wasn't hands on before his wife's death and struggles to navigate family breakfast. And what superb work by casting director Shaheen Baig to find two young boys - Richard and Henry Boxall - to play the two sons -  who are rambunctious and confused and sad and angry and tender by stages.

Southern's script, closely following the book, captures the banal and sometimes insulting cliches of the grief industry and the well-meaning but prying acquaintances.  How many times was Cumberbatch's dad asked "how he was doing?" How does one even put it into words?  But these tone-deaf inquiries are balanced by Sam Spruell's cameo as a caring brother, Vinette Robinson as a good friend, and of course, Crow, voiced by David Thewlis - masterful as always.

I came through the film feeling both that I really knew and cared for this family, and also that I had seen a raw and vulnerable exploration of grief. The book is wonderful and this film probably comes as close as one can to translating it to the screen. 

THE THING WITH FEATHERS has a running time of 98 minutes. It played Sundance and Berlin 2025.

LOVE LIES BLEEDING**

British writer-director Rose Glass (ST MAUD) returns to our screen with a Tarantino-esque GRINDHOUSE movie where romance and violence sit together in a film in which earnest emotions, comic-book stylings and laugh-out-loud absurdism sit uneasily together. For me, the film was less than the sum of its parts, but there's no doubt that the BFI Flare crowd loved it, laughing uproariously throughout. My question is whether they were laughing at, or with, a film that seemed to waste Kristen Stewart's earnest performance.

Stewart stars as Lou - a gay woman who works at a gym in a dusty desert border town seemingly run by her gun-running badass father (Ed Harris in comedy hair extensions). Lou only sticks around to protect her sister (Jena Malone) from her abusive husband. This doesn't sit well with Lou's new lover Jackie (Katy O'Brian), who dreams of winning a body building championship in Vegas and driving to the coast with Lou for a new life. 

What could've been a deeply felt emotionally intense relationship drama becomes a nasty little crime movie when Jackie goes Hulk-Smash on Lou's scumbag brother-in-law and we discover Lou's talent for cleaning up murders. I love a grungy scuzzy crime caper, but what made this a bit frustrating is that I was being asked to take the central relationship with Hulk seriously. It felt like every tonal shift was pinging me about and what was so bad it's good finally just became it's bad.

LOVE LIES BLEEDING has a running time of 104 minutes and is rated R. It played Berlin, Sundance and BFI Flare 2024 and is currently on release in the USA. It opens in the UK on April 19th.