Some stories feel like they were written for the screen before they ever reach it. Daniel Day-Lewis’s return in Anemone is one of them. The actor who swore off acting in 2017 — and who had already retreated before, to carpentry and even shoemaking in Italy — is now stepping back into the spotlight in a deeply personal project, directed by his son, Ronan Day-Lewis. Beyond co-writing the script, Daniel plays a hermit forced to face his brother (Sean Bean) and, with him, an entire legacy of silence, resentment, and buried secrets. Samantha Morton rounds out a cast that already signals heavy dramatic weight.

It’s no surprise that Hollywood immediately turned on its Oscar siren. We’re talking about the only actor in history with three Best Actor wins (My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood, Lincoln). Every time he reemerges, he seems to reset the awards season, and Anemone arrives with that very weight: not just a comeback, but a new chapter in a career that once seemed closed for good. The trailer, revealed just ahead of the New York Film Festival, carried exactly the intensity people expected. The sense is that if Day-Lewis chose to return, it wasn’t for vanity — it’s because he had something to say.

But he won’t be walking this season alone. 2025 is already shaping up as one of the strongest Best Actor races in years. Dwayne Johnson, in Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, has undergone a physical and emotional transformation that promises to silence skeptics. Michael B. Jordan finally seems poised for his first nomination with Ryan Coogler’s Sinners — a dual role in a supernatural thriller that could redeem years of Academy snubs. Jesse Plemons emerges in the unsettling Bugonia from Yorgos Lanthimos, while Oscar Isaac delivers a double punch with Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Julian Schnabel’s The Hand of Dante. Cannes has already launched Wagner Moura into the conversation with his Best Actor win for Kleber Mendonça Filho’s political thriller The Secret Agent. And then there’s Russell Crowe, gunning for a return to form more than two decades after A Beautiful Mind, with the Holocaust drama Nuremberg alongside Rami Malek.

Against this backdrop of seasoned veterans, overdue contenders, and rising stars, Daniel Day-Lewis stands not as a retired legend making a cameo, but as a genuine competitor — one with a real chance to etch his name in Oscar history once more. If Hollywood thrives on redemption stories, Anemone delivers two at once: that of a character haunted by his ghosts, and that of Day-Lewis himself, returning not to prove anything, but to remind us why his absence always felt unbearable.