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| At their 25th wedding anniversary, Ellen (Diane Lane) and Paul (Kyle Chandler) host the dinner that begins their family’s—and America’s—downfall (AI Image) |
Introduction: When the Personal Becomes Political
Jan Komasa’s Anniversary (2025) opens with a party—soft light, clinking glasses, polite laughter—and ends with the silence of fear. In between, the film traces five years of social decay through one privileged Washington, D.C. family’s unraveling. What begins as a domestic drama becomes a panoramic reflection on a country seduced by power and divided by ideology.
Polish director Jan Komasa (Corpus Christi, Suicide Room) and writer Lori Rosene-Gambino construct their story like a slow-motion implosion. The Taylors—Ellen (Diane Lane), Paul (Kyle Chandler), and their four adult children—embody the liberal, educated class convinced their institutions will protect them. When Ellen’s former student, Liz (Phoebe Dynevor), enters their orbit, she brings with her a manifesto and a movement that slowly consumes them.
Komasa’s outsider lens gives Anniversary a rare clarity. He sees America not as an exceptional democracy but as a fragile experiment, vulnerable to the same forces that dismantled Europe’s 20th-century republics.
Plot Summary: From Celebration to Contagion
The film’s title initially refers to Ellen and Paul’s 25th wedding anniversary, a dinner-party showcase of liberal civility. Their children represent varying shades of modern progressivism: Anna (Madeline Brewer), a queer comedian with a sharp tongue; Cynthia (Zoey Deutch), an environmental lawyer; Josh (Dylan O’Brien), a failed novelist nursing resentment; and Birdie (McKenna Grace), a scientifically minded teenager still forming her worldview.
Enter Liz—once Ellen’s student, now Josh’s fiancée. Her presence tilts the family’s balance. Liz’s new book, The Change: A New Social Compact, sells itself as a centrist call for unity while smuggling in authoritarian ideals: one-party governance, corporate nationalism, and the symbolism of a redesigned flag. Her rhetoric spreads like a virus, and Komasa makes that metaphor explicit: Birdie studies virology while the nation sickens from ideological infection.
Over the film’s five-year timeline—anchored by recurring family gatherings—the Taylors’ home transforms from a lively kitchen to a site of whispered fear. The ideological wars outside creep into their dining room. Civility collapses. Neighbors disappear. Josh and Liz thrive in the new order. Ellen and Paul struggle to recognize their son in the man quoting propaganda at the dinner table.
By the final anniversary—the 30th—the film’s domestic frame has widened into something national, almost apocalyptic. Komasa ends not with spectacle but with a quiet horror: a family reduced to obedience, still pretending that everything is fine.
The Family as a Microcosm of a Nation Divided
Few recent films have used the domestic sphere as effectively as Anniversary to chart political disintegration. Komasa’s camera treats the Taylors’ home like a miniature republic—each member a faction negotiating survival. The kitchen arguments, the awkward silences, the careful avoidance of “certain topics” all mirror a country afraid of itself.
Ellen’s insistence on civility, once a mark of virtue, becomes complicity. Paul’s neutrality hardens into moral cowardice. Josh’s ambition curdles into ideological zeal. Even Birdie, the young scientist, learns that reason is powerless against collective delusion.
This isn’t subtle cinema—but it isn’t meant to be. Komasa and Rosene-Gambino understand that fascism is not a whisper but a roar, and their film meets it with matching bluntness.
Jan Komasa’s Outsider View of America
Coming from Poland—a country shaped by Nazi occupation and Soviet control—Komasa approaches American politics with both fascination and dread. His earlier works (Warsaw 44, Corpus Christi) examined moral corruption under systems of power; Anniversary transplants those concerns into a U.S. context.
That distance is Anniversary’s secret weapon. Komasa sees patterns Americans overlook: the self-mythology of freedom masking conformity, the commodification of outrage, the naïveté of believing “it can’t happen here.” His America is both specific and archetypal, an empire rotting from within.
There’s a chilling symmetry in his storytelling. The same techniques used to glorify patriotic unity—family gatherings, flag ceremonies, talk-show interviews—become tools of manipulation. Komasa’s outsider perspective doesn’t accuse; it diagnoses.
The Collapse of Civility in Modern America
At its core, Anniversary is a chronicle of manners disintegrating. Komasa visualizes civility as a fragile performance. In early scenes, Ellen and Paul enforce the rule: “No politics at the table.” By the final act, politics is all that remains.
Dialogue shifts from academic debate to Orwellian doublespeak. “Compromise” becomes “submission.” “Family values” justify betrayal. Each anniversary dinner grows quieter, until the clinking of glasses sounds like funeral bells.
Komasa’s framing grows colder with each year—wide shots become locked-down surveillance angles. The color palette drains from warm gold to sterile gray. By the time Liz’s movement dominates the nation, even sunlight feels weaponized.
The film’s most haunting scenes are not of violence but of adaptation: friends rationalizing disappearances, parents thanking the regime for “keeping order.” The collapse of civility is complete when politeness becomes the language of fear.
The Art of Provocation: Too On-the-Nose or Perfectly Timed?
Critics will debate whether Anniversary’s allegory is too obvious. Its parallels to contemporary America—Project 2025 references, populist slogans, “common-sense centrism” masking authoritarianism—require little decoding. Yet that directness is part of the film’s moral stance.
Komasa rejects metaphorical safety. He wants discomfort. Like Costa-Gavras’ Z or Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Anniversary refuses ambiguity. The message is clear: history repeats because comfort demands it.
If the first act’s exposition feels like “broken glass in a garbage disposal,” as RogerEbert.com’s Matt Zoller Seitz quipped, the payoff justifies the abrasion. By the climax—a televised confrontation between Ellen and Liz—the film achieves operatic intensity, fueled by Lane’s controlled fury and Dynevor’s eerie calm.
The Ghost of Warsaw: Historical Shadows in Komasa’s America
Komasa’s Polish heritage haunts the film’s American setting. Anniversary often feels like a transposition of Europe’s 20th-century traumas onto 21st-century Washington. The final act echoes the Warsaw Uprising’s moral paradoxes—ordinary citizens caught between resistance and survival.
Ellen becomes a stand-in for intellectuals who underestimated authoritarianism’s appeal. Liz represents the demagogue born from personal humiliation. The film’s visual motifs—flags, uniforms, televised addresses—evoke the propaganda of regimes past, reframed through modern media aesthetics.
When the Taylors whisper about vanished neighbors, we hear echoes of occupied Poland’s quiet dread. Komasa’s genius lies in collapsing temporal distance: yesterday’s Europe becomes today’s America.
Performances and Craft
Diane Lane delivers one of her most disciplined performances—an academic mind cracking under moral pressure. Kyle Chandler, playing Paul, balances charm and fear with tragic subtlety. Dylan O’Brien surprises as Josh, his transformation from insecure writer to fanatic both believable and chilling.
Phoebe Dynevor’s Liz is mesmerizing: part influencer, part ideologue, all calculation. Her “compassionate gaze” and soft-spoken venom capture how modern authoritarianism hides beneath the language of empathy.
Komasa’s visual command remains impressive. Shot in Ireland (standing in for suburban D.C.), the film’s production design subtly shifts from warmth to austerity. The sound design—muffled news reports, distant chanting crowds—turns background noise into unease.
Verdict: A Warning, Not a Prediction
Anniversary doesn’t imagine the future; it extrapolates the present. Filmed in 2023, between political storms, it now feels prophetic. Its ambition outweighs its flaws, and its heavy-handed moments serve the urgency of its message.
Komasa delivers a film that’s both intimate and apocalyptic, as much about marriage as about democracy. The Taylors’ house stands as a microcosm of America—comfortable, self-assured, and fatally divided.
It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s a necessary one. Anniversary lingers like a fever dream of a country still pretending it’s awake.
Rating: ★★★½ / 4
Director: Jan Komasa
Writer: Lori Rosene‑Gambino (story with Komasa)
Key Cast: Diane Lane (Ellen), Kyle Chandler (Paul), Phoebe Dynevor (Liz), Dylan O’Brien (Josh), with Madeline Brewer, Zoey Deutch, McKenna Grace.
Runtime & Release: 111 minutes. Theatrical release in the U.S. 29 Oct 2025. Letterboxd+2thefilmstage.com+2
Premise: A well-off Washington, D.C. family, the Taylors, gather for an anniversary party; over the next five years their world and the nation’s political landscape fracture as an authoritarian-style movement takes root, spearheaded by a former student of Ellen’s
 Review — The Family as a Microcosm of a Nation Divided){kind=link}