Motivated by recent experiments on Ni(C2H8N2)(2)Ni(CN)(4) (commonly known as NENC), we study the electron spin resonance in the critical high-field phase of the antiferromagnetic S = 1 chain with strong planar anisotropy and show that the ESR spectra exhibit several peculiarities in the critical phase. Possible relevance of those results for other gapped spin systems is discussed.