Barely promoted by a studio wary of its political content, Anniversary has a Stepford Wives – reality-adjacent – quality that stops it being really incendiary. It is chilly and chilling enough, though its big message is so emollient it almost undoes all the good work director and co-writer Jan Komasa has put in to stir things up.
It’s the story of a big, noisy and mostly successful family – liberal as you like – brought low by a regime change precipitated by a book the girlfriend of one of them has written. When we first meet girlfriend Elizabeth Nettles (Phoebe Dynevor) she is nervously prepping herself for the meeting with the parents of her guy Josh (Dylan O’Brien). The next time we meet her, Elizabeth’s book, The Change: Birth of a New Nation – a manifesto for a one party state – has become a publishing sensation.
As we meet her again and again down the years, on the family’s annual get-together to celebrate the wedding anniversary of mum Ellen (Diane Lane), a university teacher, and dad Paul (Kyle Chandler), a restaurateur, Elizabeth rises and rises, while the fortunes of the liberal Taylor family – left-wing lesbian stand-up Anna (Madeline Brewer), activist lawyer Cynthia (Zoey Deutch), young scientist Birdie (Mckenna Grace) – take a hit. The only one to do well out of it is Josh, a bitter failed writer who rises along with his wife.
Outside, America has gone fascist, with flags and performative nationalism a requirement of everyday life. Elizabeth’s book has indeed wrought a Change and it’s one the Taylors, in particular Ellen, cannot go along with.
Director/co-writer Jan Komasa’s 2020 film The Hater, about a Polish neo-Nazi on the make, swam in similar waters and he brings an almost blackly comedic eye to bear on the libs, in particular, who, we sense, is the grouping Komasa feels closest to.
They don’t get an easy ride, though it is in the main drubbing by stereotyping. Smug, not as liberal as they’d imagine, and clueless as to why the world has swung so hard away from the cosy consensus that’s been so good to them. The right are just as stereotyped – mendacious and intolerant – but we don’t see as much of them.
Nice Diane Lane, star of a thousand fragrant romances, is made over. It’s one of the little joys of the film watching her play someone who’s not as nice as she thinks she is. As is watching Dylan O’Brien, locked into permanent teenagerdon since Teen Wolf made him a TV star, breaking out of his pupal case and coming across like JD Vance in a particularly wound-up state.
Phoebe Dynevor is great as Elizabeth. Hers is the performance on which the movie turns. Why did Liz write the book? Possibly to get one over on the self-satisfied establishment. Has it all gone a lot further than Liz imagined? Maybe, maybe. It’s hard to say, but Dynevor’s performance allows for a lot of different readings. Liz is not a monster, or not entirely.
In a sense there’s not much for the rest of the cast to do, though Brewer and Deutch, Grace and Daryl McCormack (who plays Cynthia’s husband) do good work in ensemble scenes largely designed to show what an establishment point of view looks like.
Without the politics it’d be a fine, fraught family drama, with generational and relationship friction, sibling rivalry and money worries aplenty. With them, it aspires to Philip Roth – The Plot Against America era – in its forensic detailing of a disaster in slow motion.
That big message, though. It’s soft-pedalled and at bottom Anniversary‘s plea for tolerance – wouldn’t it be better if we all just listened to what the other side is saying? – is part of the problem rather than the solution.
Anniversary – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
