Director: Jan Komasa
Writer: Lori Rosene-Gambino
Stars: Diane Lane, Kyle Chandler, Phoebe Dynevor
Synopsis: A provocative thriller about a very close-knit family that is torn apart as a new movement, “The Change,” envelops the country.
It’s funny until it isn’t. It’s a “fringe theory” until it becomes law. People are allowed to criticize the institutions in power until they mysteriously disappear. “Free speech” becomes “controlled speech” and is no longer what its “absolutists” have advertised freedom of expression as. The “United States” is far less “united” than it ever was. But were they ever truly? This question is at the heart of Jan Komasa’s Anniversary, which begins as a satire of “political speak” at family functions, until the Polish filmmaker, making his Hollywood debut, flips the story on its head and transforms it into a reflection of what’s currently ongoing in the country.
Is Komasa a prophet? Not really. Like Paul Thomas Anderson, who shot One Battle After Another when Donald Trump was not in the White House for the second time, Anniversary was made in 2023. The fact that it’s being released now doesn’t seem like a coincidence, though. Then again, if you’re familiar with Komasa’s oeuvre, from the morbidly funny Corpus Christi to his social media excavation The Hater, he has always been at the forefront of confronting his audience with the harsh realities of an era veering further into enshittification through the prism of a society that has become more polarizing by the day. He’s also fluent in the history of Poland as a country, which was occupied by both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Having directed both Warsaw Uprising and Warsaw ‘44, films that reckon with the country’s troubled past as totalitarian regimes invaded it, Komasa brings a deep understanding of the subject to this mirror of modern-day America.
What’s most impressive about Anniversary is how Komasa is in complete control of how Lori Rosene-Gambino’s screenplay evolves, which, again, is (very) funny for a while until it isn’t. I was genuinely surprised at how hilarious this thing is, from perfectly calibrated sight gags to timed responses that act as if a bomb has gone off inside a family that has grown more fractured with the arrival of Elizabeth Nettles (Phoebe Dynevor). She is the new girlfriend of Joosh (Dylan O’Brien) and, coincidentally, a former student of his mother, Ellen (Diane Lane).
Not recognizing who she is at first, Ellen immediately unmasks Liz during her 25th wedding anniversary with her husband, Paul (Kyle Chandler), and warns her to back off. Liz’s intentions, she says, are benevolent, and don’t illustrate the person she was as a teenager in her class, but Ellen isn’t entirely convinced she has changed one bit and believes it’s best if this relationship (we realize this has happened many times with Josh) ends as quickly as it has begun.
We don’t exactly know what prompts Ellen to react this way towards Liz, until we find out that her thesis, while in University, titled “The Change: Birth of a New Nation” (big yikes all around), advocated for a one-party system ruling over America. This thesis, which was rightfully derided and rejected by Ellen, is now on the cusp of becoming a major bestselling book, published through a conservative thinktank/organization with similar beats as PragerU, Turning Point USA, or The Heritage Foundation, with the latter having outlined “Project 2025” as the steps Donald Trump should follow when he would eventually return to the White House last year.
There’s discomfort in Ellen finding out that this anti-democratic sentiment eventually becomes an ideology that millions of people around the world gravitate towards, and it isn’t long before America follows the ideals Liz illustrated in her book and becomes the totalitarian country that is now unfolding before our very eyes. Perhaps it’s a little too on-the-nose, and the parallels between Komasa’s film and modern-day America will certainly prove divisive, because it doesn’t have much to say beyond pointing out things that are happening right now. Yet, that’s also not the point of Anniversary.
It’s a much more intelligent film than it has any right to be, because it’s not so much a warning of what America will look like in two, or perhaps a year from now, since it’s already happening. Komasa understands that, in 2023, this was the trajectory the country was heading towards. Why patronize the public when there’s no point in doing so? Rather, it focuses on the contemptuous, often gullible nature of individuals who refuse to think for themselves and would rather blindly follow fringe theories because they make them somewhat comfortable. Anyone can be sold gobbledygook (read: snake oil) by people who can effectively convey their message in an approachable way. Why did so many young Americans resonate with Charlie Kirk? It’s a pretty easy question to answer when you examine how the late polemicist engaged with people around his age and debated with them.
It’s thus easy to understand why so many Americans (and non-Americans) resonate towards “The Change,” without Komasa having to show the book’s contents. Liz is a skillful manipulator, as illustrated during the film’s opening scene, where she practices her facial expressions and the delivery of lines she will eventually say to Ellen and Paul upon meeting them during their anniversary. The family then becomes further divided as “The Change” becomes the doctrine guiding America, a few years after the book’s publication. It is at this point that Komasa stops the comedy dead in its tracks to unravel the harsh reality the country is facing and will face for decades to come.
Komasa is not treading on new ground, but the way he progresses the movie to its bone-chilling conclusion is honestly more than commendable. It doesn’t need to say anything, but it illustrates how easy it is for articulate individuals to topple a society controlled by democracy into autocracy. After all, “if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. And you will come to believe it yourself!” Fascists know what they’re doing, and Ellen catches Liz red-handed before she even realizes that Josh’s fiancée is one step ahead of everyone else.
And when her daughters, Cynthia (Zoey Deutch), Birdie (Mckenna Grace), and Anna (Madeline Brewer) are in danger, what will happen when they are forced to believe in the lies of “The Change” to protect themselves and the people they love most? Komasa gives no answers to this predicament. He instead builds upon the layers of unease and discomfort of his opening section to turn it into a terrifying meditation on a country that has openly embraced totalitarianism and doesn’t realize the consequential impact this will have across the globe, and, most importantly, at a profoundly individual level.
He examines how politics corrupts and transforms even the best of us, the ones who will theoretically “resist” until their last breath, but eventually kowtow to the fascist regime because they have theoretically no way out. This is what happens with every totalitarian regime – people are forced to submit to the ideology in power if they (and their family) want to survive. It doesn’t happen all of a sudden, as the change (get it?) happens progressively. There are a lot more complex questions raised than answers in Anniversary, but that’s precisely what Komasa wants you to think about as it reaches a denouement that will undoubtedly divide, but linger deep in your memory.
In that regard, Diane Lane delivers her most compelling on-screen performance since her Oscar-nominated turn in Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful, as a woman who wants to keep fighting on, as the times move in darker directions than she ever thought possible, but is forced to make harsh decisions to protect the people she loves the most. With the movie being as funny as it is, Lane is often quite mordant in her line delivery and has an insatiably palpable alchemy with Chandler, who acts as the “apolitical” high ground of the family, until, once again, he is forced to reckon with his ideologies in a frightening confrontation that puts the couple in a precarious position they never imagined would happen in their lifetimes. Dynevor also gets under your skin as the fascist who knows exactly how to articulate her message so her eventual husband gets roped into the film’s version of The Heritage Foundation and becomes more powerful than the author herself.
At that point, Komasa begins to question if Liz’s line of thinking predates her downfall, but the movie doesn’t seem as interested in parsing this throughline as its most pressing subjects. That said, there’s no denying Anniversary crawls under your skin in ways that few films that dare speak truth to power against the fascists currently running the United States will. Komasa’s experience with his Warsaw diptych might have been the reason why the film feels so alive and accurately depicts the authoritarian turn in America that many conservative pundits and politicians will try to justify as necessary, when they will eventually walk back on everything they’ve said, or ignore it ever happened decades after Trump has bit the dust. But we’ll remember who supported – and uplifted – this, long after the dust has settled and a semblance of normalcy has returned to this failed nation.
