Anniversary (2025) [Movie Review] — A Brutal, Beautiful Warning About Power and Home

A family drama turned dystopian parable — Jan Komasa’s Anniversary is an unsettling, often brilliant examination of how authoritarianism spreads from politics into the most intimate rooms of our lives.

Opening verdict: A challenging, timely watch that rewards big-picture thinking

Jan Komasa, working from a story he co-wrote with Lori Rosene-Gambino, aims squarely for the zeitgeist: an intimate family story that doubles as a projection of what happens when a popular, polished ideology eats a democracy from the inside. The film is ambitious and frequently gripping; it’s also willing to be blunt where subtler films might shy away. That directness is its strength and, occasionally, its weakness.

Direction & Vision: Komasa’s outsider clarity sharpens familiar domestic drama into political alarm

Komasa’s background in films about life under repression gives him an edge: he sees patterns Americans sometimes miss. He stages scenes with documentary-like immediacy and a dramaturgical patience that lets small domestic slights bloom into national catastrophe. The movie’s scope — spanning multiple anniversaries and years — helps it feel epic without losing its local, human stakes.

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Performances: A grounded, vivid ensemble anchors the film’s speculations

Diane Lane brings weary moral force to Ellen, the professor whose public life and private relationships become battlegrounds; Kyle Chandler is quietly complex as the husband torn between love and survival. Phoebe Dynevor’s Liz is deliciously unnerving — charismatic, strategic, and chillingly plausible as a media-ready agitator. Dylan O’Brien and McKenna Grace add textured support as family members whose compromises and doubts are heartbreakingly believable. The cast sells the film’s central conceit: ordinary people, under pressure, make both cowardly and brave choices.

Themes & Writing: Overt allegory, but one that lands when viewed broadly

The screenplay uses disease and contagion as metaphors for ideological spread — sometimes blunt, sometimes uncanny. Its politics are explicit: it imagines how a movement branded as “common sense” can institutionalize cruelty while promising normalcy. The film doesn’t hesitate to show how money, prestige, and fear corrode resistance; its portrait of complicity is nuanced, refusing simple villain/hero binaries.

Pacing & Flaws: A slow-building first act and a climax that asks you to leap — but the emotional payoff often justifies the stretch

The opening is exposition-heavy and can feel like chewing glass; character setup drags in places. The final act leans on an occurrence that asks viewers to accept a dramatic escalation that not everyone will. Still, if you accept the film’s premise, the payoff is potent: scenes of personal and civic collapse that linger long after the credits.

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Conclusion: Not flawless, but essential viewing for the moment

Anniversary isn’t subtle, and it occasionally telegraphs its moral to the point of bluntness. Yet the combination of Komasa’s direction, committed performances, and a willingness to imagine a near future that’s both plausible and horrifying makes it a memorable piece of political filmmaking. It won’t convert skeptics, but it will stay in the mind of anyone who watches it — and that’s precisely the point.

Final score: 7/10 — a thoughtful, sometimes uncomfortable dramatization of how authoritarianism can arrive not with a thunderclap, but at the family table.