Jan Komasa’s Anniversary is a chilling, superbly acted dystopian drama that asks where political division ultimately leads — even if it doesn’t always have the room to fully answer its own question.
There’s a long and distinguished tradition of dystopian fiction built around the question of how quickly a functioning democracy can be dismantled—and how ordinary people can find themselves either complicit in or consumed by that process. Jan Komasa’s Anniversary, the Polish director’s English-language debut, plants itself squarely in that tradition. It’s an ambitious, well-acted and frequently unsettling film that asks where political division ultimately leads. That it isn’t fully successful is a measure of how high it has set its own bar.
The setup is genuinely compelling. Diane Lane and Kyle Chandler play a DC-area power couple — she’s a celebrated Georgetown professor, he’s a restaurateur — celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary with their four children: a failed sci-fi writer (Dylan O’Brien), an environmental lawyer (Zoey Deutch), a stand-up comedian (Madeline Brewer) and a shy teenage daughter (McKenna Grace). The inciting incident arrives when O’Brien’s character brings home a new girlfriend, Elizabeth (Phoebe Dynevor), whom Lane’s professor recognises as a former student who once authored a thesis advocating for one-party rule in the name of national unity. Tension is rife between the family members over this, swiftly catalysing into horror as Elizabeth’s thesis becomes the basis for a bestselling book — and a rising fascist movement called The Change. The family fractures along ideological lines before the regime steadily destroys their life as they know it.
The cast is the film’s most unambiguous asset. Dylan O’Brien continues to prove himself as a brilliantly astute character actor, emerging from his YA Maze Runner roots and showing his mettle in more artistic fare (if you haven’t seen Twinless, go check it out now. In Anniversary, he convincingly tracks his character’s transformation from earnest and nerdy student to chillingly creepy dictator-bro with a precision and commitment that makes the premise feel horribly plausible. The rest of the ensemble matches him, and there is real skill in the way Komasa orchestrates the shifting allegiances and erupting tensions of the family dynamic.
The actual descent into dystopia, however, isn’t as carefully executed. The film’s timespan is just five years, culminating in the parents’ thirtieth anniversary. The idea that any country could descend into totalitarian rule in half a decade suggests a misunderstanding about how such regimes take hold. Totalitarianism is generally a slow infection rather than an overnight conversion, and compressing it so dramatically robs the story of the texture it needs. A longer timespan, stretched across a few decades, might have worked better. There’s also the idea that such a transformation could be driven so decisively by a single manifesto that there would be no obvious pushback, or that people in their twenties would be the ones to lead it. Whilst it’s true many countries have seen a noticeable shift towards right-wing politics amongst the young, Gen Z remains more liberal than older generations, particularly the women. Positioning the boomer couple as the democratic resistance runs counter to much of what we have actually observed, and is a choice that feels more dramatically convenient than politically honest.
The single-location setting works as a pressure cooker. It’s atmospherically effective and adds a sense of claustrophobia to the whole thing, but ultimately limits the film’s scope in ways that feel more like a budgetary constraint than a creative choice. It often feels like the story might work better onstage than onscreen. We’re told that the movement has swept the country, but we have almost no sense of the world beyond this one house — of why ordinary Americans have embraced The Change so readily, or of what daily life under it actually looks like. The result is a film that makes its argument powerfully in miniature but struggles to convince at the scale it is attempting.
What it does particularly well is demonstrate how the seeds of totalitarianism often spring from utopian visions. The idea is reminiscent of what Margaret Atwood has said of utopias: that she’s always been distrustful of them when pitched by politicians, since they often involve eradicating certain people from society deemed unsuitable — effectively, things are going to be great, we just need to get rid of these people. And we’ve seen this throughout the twentieth century — Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
At a time when artists are at pains to insist their art isn’t political (spoiler alert: all art is political), it’s refreshing to see a director take on the division that feels endemic across the West and offer a warning as to where things could be headed. Anniversary is exactly that: a warning, delivered with urgency and considerable craft. It just needed more time, and more room, to give that warning its full impact.
An ambitious, well-performed feature about the fragility of democracy, Anniversary doesn’t always convince at the scale it attempts, but manages to earn its place among the more serious films of the modern era.
★★★
Screened at Kinoteka Polish film Festival on March 1st, available on Netflix now / Diane Lane, Kyle Chandler, Dylan O’Brien, Zoey Deutch, Madeline Brewer, McKenna Grace, Phoebe Dynevor / Dir: Jan Komasa / Lionsgate Films, Roadside Attractions / 15
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