First look at Daniel Day-Lewis back from retirement in son’s movie

Finally, one bright spot along a long, dark road.

The world mourned when acting legend Daniel Day-Lewis announced his retirement from the craft following the release of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s 2017 romance Phantom Thread. The British star of stage and screen kept his word until last fall, when he announced he’d co-written a screenplay with his son, Ronan Day-Lewis, and intended to star in the resulting film.

Fans of the Lincoln star will soon get a chance to see the film, titled Anemone, which released a first look at its mustachioed star on Tuesday.

The three-time Oscar winner stars in the fraught family drama officially described as an inquiry into “about lives undone by seemingly irreconcilable legacies of political and personal violence.”

Day-Lewis plays a reclusive hermit who reluctantly reunites with his middle-aged brother (Sean Bean) after they encounter one another in the woods of Northern England. The film anatomizes their tense and enigmatic relationship, which is riven by fractures from both small and large violent events that occurred decades before.

Oscar nominee Samantha Morton (In America), Samuel Bottomley (How to Have Sex), and Safia Oakley-Green (She Said) fill out the cast as costars.

Anemone is slated for its world premiere at the 2025 New York Film Festival, which bows on Sept. 26. Day-Lewis has a rich history with the festival, which also hosted the premiere of the Steven Spielberg-directed 2012 biopic Lincoln. The actor’s portrayal of the titular political icon won him his third Academy Award, after 1989’s My Left Foot and 2007’s There Will Be Blood.

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Ronan Day-Lewis, meanwhile, trained as a painter at Yale University, graduating with a B.A. in Art in 2020 and showing his work in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and beyond. His film work began with a series of videos commissioned for a 2020 production of Philip Glass’ opera Les Enfants Terribles and continued with the short film The Sheep and the Wolf.

Anemone will receive a limited theatrical release on Oct. 3 before expanding nationwide on Oct. 10.