“Anniversary,” about a family torn apart by an authoritarian movement within the United States of America, is ripe for nitpicking and perhaps outright rejection, on the basis that it’s too on-the-nose, too opportunistically topical, too muddled in its message, too fragmented in its storytelling, or just too inconsistent. As always, your mileage will vary. Be warned that the first act is a bit of a slog, with exposition that goes down as smoothly as broken glass in a garbage disposal, and that the powerful climax hinges on an event that you have to decide to believe could happen. Nevertheless, it stays with you—and if you take a macro rather than micro view, its ambition is easy to see, and its timing is perfect.
“Anniversary” is directed by Polish filmmaker Jan Komasa (“Suicide Room,” “Corpus Christi”) and written by Lori Rosene-Gambino, who partnered with Komasa on the story. Komasa sees America more clearly than most American filmmakers might, having grown up in a country that’s been occupied by Nazi Germany and the former U.S.S.R, and having directed other films about life under authoritarianism, including the hybrid documentary-drama “Warsaw 44.” At first, this film’s title appears to refer only to a familial event that opens the story: The 25th wedding anniversary of Ellen (Diane Lane), a political science professor with progressive views who teaches at Georgetown University; and her husband Paul (Kyle Chandler), a chef turned restaurateur whose Washington, D.C. eatery is a magnet for the city’s power players, and profitable enough to fund elite educations for the couple’s four children, three of whom have left the nest. But the movie is built around many gatherings occurring over a five-year timespan, ending with the couple’s 30th anniversary. We see the family grow in size but shift in power dynamics, then break apart as an authoritarian movement known as The Message spreads across society.
In retrospect, the most important anniversary of them all marks the date when the agent of the family’s downfall entered their lives: a young woman named Liz (Phoebe Dynevor). Liz is a former student of Ellen’s who felt rejected and humiliated for her outspoken right-wing politics, but is about to become a conservative media star. Her first book, The Change: A New Social Compact–a manifesto as thick as a shoebox—is about to be published. She is dating the couple’s only son, Josh (Dylan O’Brien), a wannabe novelist whose first effort was rejected by publishers. This made Josh feel like a failure in relation to his mom, a public intellectual who’s drafted by her department head to appear on a national news show and defend the Ivy League system against accusations that they’re “bastions for organized liberalism.”
Liz is phonier than a televangelist’s tears, but not everyone at the party recognizes it because she’s mastered a compassionate gaze and a warm tone. Exhibit A is Paul, who insists that anyone taking part in a family gathering leave their personal politics at the door. Initially, we have no idea where Paul stands on the issues of the day. Is he also a progressive, albeit less outspoken than Ellen, or a conservative who loves his wife more than he hates her politics? We’re also not sure about their youngest daughter, Birdie (McKenna Grace), a budding scientist who seems focused on the mechanics of viral infection and is politically very much a work-in-progress.
There’s no doubt about the other sisters, though. Anna (Madeline Brewer) is a lesbian shock-comic fueled by left-wing politics and feminist solidarity. Cynthia (Zoey Deutch) is a lawyer working on environmental cases with her boyfriend Rob (Daryl McCormick), the only nonwhite member of the core cast, though one whose identity is less a factor in his decisions than a desire for acceptance and material comfort. You see where things are headed. Some of these characters are more secure in their identities and choices than others. The promise of money, influence, or both can go a long way towards convincing people to jump the fence, unless they have rock-solid morals and an ability to withstand suffering.
The movie isn’t shy about offering disease as a metaphor for how ideological contagions spread. Liz’s manifesto becomes a surprise bestseller, igniting a “common sense” movement that claims it’s about uniting a divided populace and putting people at the center of American life again. The movement presents itself as centrist or somehow “above politics” even as it embraces right-wing signifiers, such a redesigned national flag, a desire for one-party rule (though a third party created and blessed by them), and a partnership with a huge corporation that funds a right-wing think tank in the vein of The Heritage Foundation (the architects of Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s second term). The violence and chaos that accrue when right-wing populists unite around Liz’s book are mirrored inside the home, where people who want to get along end up clawing at each other, even selling one another out for self-interested reasons.
A bombshell always goes off at cinematic events like Ellen and Paul’s anniversary party. Liz presses the button by telling Ellen that she and Josh are engaged. This is the first of many power moves that seem intended mainly to avenge past injuries by Ellen, who treated Liz the student as an adversary, and will treat Liz the political figurehead as a menace to democracy. The justifiably paranoid Ellen thinks Liz hooked up with her son to roll out a long-term vendetta that will punish Ellen by infiltrating her family, converting its members to her side, and ultimately absorbing it, just as the movement hopes to do to the U.S. populations The point here isn’t whether Ellen is wrong or right about that. Yes, it’s hard to see how Liz could be the hero of this movie, unless you’re the kind of viewer who argues that “Star Trek” only recently began endorsing progressive messages, or that the Galactic Empire was the good guys in “Star Wars.” But as the movie shows us, people are complicated and don’t always understand why they do things, much less anticipate every consequence.
Liz’s desire to dominate Ellen is the first instance in “Anniversary” of a motif that is true to what we know about human nature: the origin story of many authoritarian figureheads begins with a moment of failure or humiliation, whether it’s a future German despot being labeled a bad painter or a future American president getting slagged by his predecessor at a White House Correspondents Dinner. Private citizens do this as well, and we see it happening throughout this movie. After Ellen slights Liz by treating her as an adversary at the anniversary party, Liz weaponizes her anniversary gift, an advance copy of The Change, by handing it to Ellen fully wrapped as they’re heading out the front door to drive home. It’s another (metaphorical) explosive device that’s on time-delay, and its detonation injures Ellen’s ego by saying, “You shouldn’t have underestimated me—and now I have your son, and will soon have the important bestseller you’ve always dreamed of.”
Future attacks include announcements of Liz’s pregnancy (with twins!) and her promotion to a coveted slot at Georgetown, which dethrones Ellen as the department’s star. Both Josh and Liz revel in the sight of Ellen and Paul stifling their discomfort and watching their words for fear of making a scene. The New Josh verbally torments family members who either didn’t validate his ambitions before he met Liz or consider him a menace now that Liz’s success has enabled him to buy fancy cars, hire a multilingual au pair to raise the twins, and otherwise carry on like a smug young Nazi functionary in a World War II thriller.
Allegiances and tactics shift over time. The conflicts, sudden tragedies, and moments of distilled rage and fear within the household reflect events in the broader world. We see how easily political power can be weaponized to punish those whose only crime is to criticize or oppose their leaders. We see how certain words—such as “sedition” in this movie, and “terrorist” in modern America—can be twisted into all-purpose rubber stamps justifying inhumane policies. Most of all, we see how power itself can seem like a life force unto itself, a ravenous, feral beast that ruthlessly ambitious people mistakenly think they can train and control like a house pet. There’s even a subplot that’s the political thriller version of the classic 2015 Twitter post “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”
By the end, people are considering selling each other out for for all sorts of reasons, including the lure of a cushy job, even as they’re staying indoors and whispering about whether a disappeared person should be presumed dead. You might feel as if you’re watching a movie about Argentina’s Dirty War transplanted to North America—not a cautionary tale, but a projection of what the U.S. will become if present trends continue. Imagine something along the lines of the superb political drama “I’m Still Here,” but released in Brazil in 1970s instead of last year. Scene after scene underlines a fact that survivors of dictatorship carry in their DNA: the power trip of fascism isn’t just the transgressive turn-on of ignoring laws and personal consent and taking what you want through violence; it’s also the aftermath, in which the victims are compelled to perform a twisted pantomime of normalcy, and thank the same people who ruined them.
Some of the brutal scenarios “Anniversary” envisions are already unfolding across the United States. The supermajority of voters that prefers an imperfect democracy to a perfect engine of cruelty is resisting the government’s violence against its own citizens and organizing to stave off worse scenarios, versions of which dominate the movie’s wrenchingly melodramatic second half. “Anniversary” did not predict the future: shot in 2023, during a liberal interregnum between Trump administrations, its makers appear to have gamed out where things might go if authoritarians took over the federal government again, based on similar scenarios in other countries. Unfortunately, they nailed it.
The result feels like one of the many thoughtful films made about life under dictatorship, but with a unique twist: This one isn’t critiquing past events in Argentina, Chile, or Uganda from a safe historical distance, but events happening right now in the U.S., from behind a scrim of metaphor as thin as tissue paper. An Iranian, Chinese or Russian film as uncompromising in its values and as unambiguous about its targets as “Anniversary”—or a version produced in Komasa’s home country under Soviet occupation—would be punished with jail or worse. One suspects that “Anniversary” would not have gotten funding, or at least domestic distribution, had it been written this year—and that if it did somehow find its way to the starting line, some of its participants might have dropped out for their family’s sake, after having watched nine months’ worth of video of Americans being assaulted, detained, and disappeared by masked men for criticizing the president or having the wrong color skin. That “Anniversary” depicts oppressed and terrorized Americans doing much riskier things under far bleaker circumstances saves it from doomerism, leaving viewers with shreds of hope.
