Writer-director Jan Komasa’s (The Hater, Warsaw 44, Suicide Room) latest film, Anniversary, opens in a darkened auditorium at an unnamed university as Ellen Taylor (Diane Lane), a rock star professor, expounds on her ideas about life, literature, and art.
Proudly describing herself as neither right nor left, neither liberal nor conservative, Ellen embraces art as transcending dichotomies, focusing on the so-called “human condition” and its discontents, an approach she ascribes to the late 19th-century Russian playwright Anton Chekov.
Before long, however, Ellen will find herself at the center of a chillingly realistic dystopian drama centered on a controversy-courting, reactionary ex-student, Elizabeth “Liz” Nettles (Phoebe Dynevor). Almost a decade after Ellen and Liz abruptly parted ways as teacher and student, Liz reenters Ellen’s life, not as a fellow instructor or professor, but as the girlfriend of Ellen’s only son, Josh (Dylan O’Brien), on the first of several anniversaries covered by Komasa and screenwriter Lori Rosene-Gambino’s all too relevant contribution to our current political hell-scape.
A failed writer barely hiding resentment at his mother’s outsized expectations for his stalled career, Josh has shifted his focus to Liz, not just as a romantic partner and potential life-mate, but as the vehicle for his own professional ambitions: To wit, Liz has turned the anti-democratic thesis of her college paper into a doorstop of a polemic, a master plan for the so-called “restoration” of the United States from a country riven by political conflict and chaos of our deeply flawed democracy into nationalistic, unity-enabling, one-party rule, “The Change: A New Social Contract.”
Komasa and Rosene-Gambino purposely leave the details of Liz’s tome vague, dropping expository nuggets suggesting Liz has swapped familiar words and meanings to support right-wing, populist nationalism. Rosene-Gambino’s screenplay leaves evangelical Christianity and its association with nationalism off-screen, though an uncomfortable moment later in the film, where Ellen and her family hold hands at the dinner table, heads bowed in dutiful silence, suggests otherwise.
While the script’s intentional vagueness will be a problem for some, Liz’s book becoming not just a national bestseller, but sparking a national movement that absorbs at least one political party, and possibly true, sweeping aside political institutions and norms, rings false. As recent American history has proven, right-wing demagogues emerge not from the written word, but from the alliance of a charismatic figure using hatred, ignorance, and bigotry, first to ascend to the national stage and second to turn one of the country's oldest political parties into a cult of the supreme, unerring leader (a "cult of personality"). Said cult leader would, of course, ally himself with the billionaire-backed right-wing media and saturate the airwaves and social media with his message.
Anniversary might not fully capture the mechanics of a right-wing, fascist ascendancy in the United States, but it's singular focus on the rapid fall of an upper-middle-class family (Caucasian edition) through Liz’s deliberately opaque interventions, elevates it beyond its budget limitations (it’s set mostly in and around Ellen’s home) or its occasional story-based stumbles like the aforementioned credulity straining text at the center of Liz’s rise to power.
Where Anniversary aligns most closely with our current reality, however, lies in the shifting relationships, alliances, and dynamics of Ellen, the Josh and Liz duo, Paul (Kyle Chandler), Ellen’s westaraunter husband, and their other children, Cynthia (Zoey Deutch), a self-styled, do-gooding environmental lawyer, Anna (Madeline Brewer), an edgy, left-of-center stand-up comic, and Birdie (McKenna Grace), a wunderkind obsessed with the invisible world.
As Liz’s ascension continues, Josh always at her side, Ellen’s backward slide into irrelevance gains momentum, Paul’s restaurant begins to falter, Anna faces threats of violence, Cynthia’s relationship with her professional/life-partner, Rob Thompson (Daryl McCormack), falters, and Birdie, self-absorbed and initially apolitical, becomes a prize of sorts for the manipulative Liz. The latter hopes to woo Birdie through a coveted internship at the Cumberland Company, a multi-national conglomerate openly financing Liz and her movement’s rise to political prominence.
Unfolding over five years, the almost yearly family get-togethers become tenser, fraught with the shifting power dynamics typical of families slowly acclimatizing to a life under fascism: a compromise here, an implied threat or challenge left unsaid there, or eye contact broken by the implicit fear that an individual’s sympathies might be revealed. Fascism doesn’t always need overt complicity. Sometimes, it only requires obeying in advance, power given away without anything in return.
Not so subtly, Josh’s role within the family, initially as the unkempt, bearded failson, pawing Liz less out of desire or lust than insecurity, changes perceptibly over the years. His literal place at the table shifts from a side chair to the head of the table, smugly relishing his newfound position of authority over his family, all while Liz, first his superior in the relationship, then his equal, and now possibly something less, views with seemingly increasing concern at the monster she both created and unleashed on the world.
Although Anniversary overflows with uniformly strong performances, O’Brien's stands out above the rest. O’Brien perfectly captures Josh’s insecurities, his apparent failures as a writer and a son, and his near-eating himself alive from the inside out. Once Liz ascends to a bestselling author and spokesperson/brand ambassador for a new-century fascism, O’Brien’s physicality shifts, too. He stands taller, speaks more authoritatively, and exploits his family’s adherence to norms of civility to a dismissive, often demeaning effect.
In a film with few, if any, subtleties, Josh’s emergence in the last act sporting a haircut favored by fascists tells us almost everything we need to know about where the in-film world has gone in the short span of five years: The overt suppression of dissent, a surveillance state on steroids, and scattered resistance cells offering only the faintest glimmer of hope for an America no longer united by its beliefs in democracy or the limits of power embedded by a constitution, but by raw, naked power, power for power’s sake.
Ultimately, if Anniversary isn’t a cautionary tale for our fraught times, it’s hard to know what is.
Anniversary opens is now playing, only in movie theaters, via Lionsgate. Visit their official site for locations and showtimes.