‘Anniversary’ Review: Jan Komasa’s Timid Dystopia Imagines An American Dictatorship

A film with the potential to be genuinely challenging, arriving in a landscape that has largely stopped engaging with political subjects (for reasons tied to the very theme of the film itself), Anniversary can be read as a warning about a totalitarian future that feels more plausible right now than it has in a long time. The American production, directed by Poland’s Jan Komasa, has plenty of provocative elements that tie its story to what can be felt in many cities and countries today. But its lack of definition and of consistent dramatic development leaves the impact more diffuse than it should be. At a certain point, it’s as if the movie itself doesn’t quite dare to offend the powers that be and risk losing viewers because of it.

Anniversary could easily share a universe with The Handmaid’s Tale, since it tells something similar: the passage from American democracy to a totalitarian government. The difference is that in Margaret Atwood’s novel, later turned into a series, the political shift was unmistakably conservative and far-right, and that was clear from the first minute. Here, the ideological turn toward dictatorship is handled in far more generic terms. Once power is seized, what takes hold is a one-party regime that curtails individual freedoms in the name of total control. And that’s about all we’re told. It could be a offshoot of fascism, or of communism, or of whatever the viewer chooses to read into it. Komasa offers very few clues.

That vagueness might have been interesting to explore during the Cold War (Komasa is Polish, and was born under a very different kind of regime). Today it comes across as surprisingly timid, since only the far right holds the de facto power, and has the means, to turn the United States into something like this. No other political space can contest that dubious honor. The film’s timidity is its central problem, and it radiates into everything else. It doesn’t sink the movie entirely, since some of its themes still work, but it costs the film force and relevance.

Specifically, Anniversary charts the conversion of the United States into a dictatorship from inside a family that gathers, over five turbulent years, to celebrate the parents’ anniversary. They are university professor Ellen Taylor (Diane Lane) and her husband Paul (Kyle Chandler), a restaurant owner. They’re wealthy, ostensibly progressive, and life is smiling on them when we meet them at their 25th wedding anniversary party. Their eldest daughter, Anna (Madeline Brewer), is a stand-up comedian; the youngest, Birdie (McKenna Grace), is still in high school; and the middle two, Cynthia (Zoey Deutch) and Josh (Dylan O’Brien), have brought their respective partners: Rob (Daryl McCormack) and Liz (Phoebe Dynevor).

It is Liz who draws the family into the conflict that will devastate it. A former student of Ellen’s, she had a fraught history with her professor after submitting a theoretical paper advocating something called «The Change,» a fascist-tinged political theory that got her shut out of intellectual circles. Her reappearance in Ellen’s life is a shock, but things get worse once her book, also titled The Change, is published (with financing from a corporation, perhaps the film’s clearest ideological marker). Liz becomes a political leader with totalitarian ambitions, and the rest of the family watches in horror as much of the country joins her cause, Josh among them.

The film from the director of Corpus Christi reunites the family nearly every year at the parents’ home, and little by little we watch their comfortable situation and warm relationships crack until they’re unrecognizable. Persecutions, escapes, fights, political conversions, threats, and violence of every kind (verbal first, then physical) fill out this transparent national (or universal) metaphor for how totalitarian ideas «infect» any form of coexistence: a rift of epic proportions that turns a family into a battlefield, with consequences no one could have imagined.

The film is anything but subtle in presenting the family as a collection of types who live in harmony until an outside threat breaks them apart. Lori Rosene-Gambino’s screenplay doesn’t ask how a totalitarian government affects an ordinary family. It gives us one that includes the leader of the «revolutionary» movement, one of her chief ideological enemies, and others who could eventually become public enemies themselves. What we get is less a rift than an earthquake, and by pitting the sides against each other so bluntly, the film forfeits the chance at a more realistic, organic debate.

Despite its flaws, Anniversary is right to wade into sensitive and potentially irritating subjects that deserve to be argued over. In a Hollywood industry that rarely pokes its nose into these matters, Komasa’s film is a valuable one, and it’s less widely known than it might have been. You can understand the dramatic and narrative shortcomings and the flimsy characterization that led it to go unnoticed, but the claims that Lionsgate «buried» the film under political pressure also sound credible. Either way, even if it’s not a great movie, Anniversary deserves to be seen and discussed as a reflection of our times. And as a way of grasping both the need for contemporary cinema to deal with reality, and how hard it finds it to do so.