Weirdly implausible for a film about a modern American family being torn apart by a fast-moving fascistic movement (a movement that’s led by one of their own members!), Jan Komasa’s “Anniversary” has precious little interest in politics. On the contrary, this sober exercise in “you are here” terror is much less interested in left or right than it is in the base appetites of power. Insecurity. Resentment. Belonging. The kind of forces that can eat through the foundations of a household as easily as they can erode the constitution of a country.
In “Anniversary,” one serves as a microcosm for the other, a conflation that’s made a little easier to recognize — and a whole lot harder to believe — by the film’s abject refusal to engage with specifics. By the parable-like broadness of its belief that love is the only thing lucid enough to see through an Orwellian assault on reality. Taut and well-acted as this queasy little thriller can be, its unflinching tale of corporate authoritarianism is much too streamlined to reflect the emotional truth of watching totalitarianism in motion. The result is a hollow synecdoche of today’s America that seems timely and ridiculous in equal measure, the way it would be if someone were trapped in a burning house and, instead of a ladder or a hose, the emergency workers showed up with a cheap-looking Lionsgate movie about how awful it feels to die in a fire.
It’s obvious from the opening moments that “Anniversary” wants to grab ahold of the third rail with a fully insulated glove. Case in point: Diane Lane is cast as Ellen Taylor, a Georgetown professor who’s clearly meant to be enmeshed within the campus culture wars (we even see her do a cable TV news hit for one of those brainrot panel shows where people just yell at each other from their living rooms), but the first words of her opening lecture to a sea of rapt students are “I am neither liberal nor conservative — I prefer to think of myself as a free artist, nothing more.”
That may be, but the movie around her leaves no doubt that Ellen would’ve voted for Obama a third time if she could have; she’s a hyper-educated intellectual who quotes Chekhov at will, spawned a millennial brood of environmental lawyers and miscellaneous creative types, and met her semi-emasculated husband while standing in front of René Magritte’s “The Lovers” (restauranteur Paul is played by Kyle Chandler). Needless to say, Ellen doesn’t seem like the type to think a toad-brained former game show host and lifelong racist should be President of the United States. In fact, when all four of the Taylors’ children return to the family’s Chappaquiddick-like home in the Virginia suburbs to celebrate their parents’ 25th wedding anniversary, Ellen is horrified — and I mean horrified — to discover that her scruffy failson Josh (an excellent Dylan O’Brien) is dating a former student of hers who once wrote a radical paper advocating for America to adopt a one-party system.
The girl’s name is Elizabeth Nettles (watch out!), she’s played with menacing faux-naivete by Phoebe Dynevor (whose prim but fiercely ideological performance suggests Bari Weiss as a Seventh-day Adventist), and she’s very much still pushing for a kind of militant centrism that would bring the country together by punishing thoughtcrime. Liz has even written an epic manifesto on the subject; it’s called “The Change,” it’s dedicated to “All the haters, doubters, and academic stranglers,” and she gifts Ellen the first copy as an ominous harbinger of what’s to come.
When the movie picks up again two years later, Liz’s book has sold 10 million copies, Josh has become a kept man, and a country pregnant with resentments is about to give birth to a new order so hellbent upon peace that any show of dissent is punished with blacklists, disappearances, or worse. “Or worse” is largely left to our imagination, but it isn’t long before the Taylor’s eldest daughter — Madeline Brewer as Anna, a stand-up comedian who swears by “Putney Swope” — is attacked onstage during one of her sets (by a mob, not an assault rifle) and forced to go underground. That her parents don’t know where she is doesn’t protect them from the social and financial consequences of refusing to divulge her whereabouts, just as being Elizabeth Nettles’ in-laws doesn’t afford them any special treatment.
Fascism without corruption is sort of like a birthday party without cake, but I suppose it’s possible that Liz’s corporate brand of autocracy, which is executed through the auspices of something called The Cumberland Company, is too absolute in its policies to make such exceptions. Or maybe Josh, who was always resentful towards his mom for making light of his mediocrity, sees the power he now wields over his parents as more of a feature than a bug. We don’t know, and “Anniversary” doesn’t tell us. Cumberland’s relationship to the White House is unclear, the dictums of “The Change” are reduced to a new flag that lumps all 50 stars into the middle, and the question of how a grassroots movement so frictionlessly assumed power without preying upon fear — Liz’s teachings appeal to people irrespective of race, sexuality, gender identity, or any of the other things that Trumpism relies upon to scare up support — is asked in passing and left wholly unanswered.
Komasa’s film would rather not get hung up on the details. The point is that power is an all-consuming force that callously feeds on whatever people are most starved for in their souls; it poses as something that can be claimed, but only so that it can take everything from those foolish enough to feel like it ever truly belongs to them. To that end, “Anniversary” would like to believe that eschewing the nuts-and-bolts of politics allows it to focus on the pain of resistance — on how Ellen and Paul’s steadfast love for their children allows them to see The Change for what it really is (the movie spans exactly five years, but almost never leaves the grounds of the Taylor family’s home). In practice, however, the frazzled credibility that Lane and Chandler bring to the crisis only highlights the unbelievability of the crisis itself.
It’s riveting and relatable to watch these people be eaten alive by the parasite that’s invaded their family (Chandler crumbles with heartrending dignity, while Lane sinks her teeth into juicy lines like “If you try to groom another one of my children, I will kill you”), but the premise begins to peel apart at the edges whenever raw emotion makes room for even a millisecond of logic or context. The same is true of their kids. While O’Brien’s transformation from untalented writer to well-groomed sociopath is utterly believable (Zoey Deutch’s unraveling from successful lawyer to nihilistic depressive much less so, if only because the movie doesn’t give her the runway needed to crash that hard), his ascent only makes sense in the abstract, and “Anniversary” fails to make the case as to why his growing cruelness wouldn’t be more of an asset to the cause.
There’s something to be said for the vertiginous disquiet of a character-based story that succumbs to entropy in order to move its story along (the internal tensions reflect the evils of the Change, but are ultimately irrelevant to it), but “Anniversary” is too sweatily reverse-engineered from its ending to survive all of the sacrifices it makes to get there. While there’s no denying the cold stab of Komasa’s closing images, it’s hard — in the fall of 2025 — to find any lasting value in a film that makes America’s surrender to fascism seem fundamentally unbelievable. The only moment that earns the full ugliness of its truth? When, in an unthinking effort to tune out national disarray and imminent personal crisis, one of the characters turns to his partner and asks: “What podcast do you want to listen to?”
Grade: C
Lionsgate will release “Anniversary” in theaters on Wednesday, October 29.
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