Anniversary is the dinner-party horror show America didn’t know it was hosting. Jan Komasa, Polish director of Corpus Christi and Warsaw 44, peers across the Atlantic and sees the rot clearer than most natives. The film spans five years of poisoned toasts, from Ellen (Diane Lane) and Paul’s (Kyle Chandler) 25th anniversary to their 30th, but the real countdown starts the night Liz (Phoebe Dynevor) walks in.
Liz: former student of progressive professor Ellen, humiliated in seminar, now dating Ellen’s failed-novelist son Josh (Dylan O’Brien) and clutching a door-stopper manifesto titled The Change. Gift-wrapped and handed over like a live grenade.
The family is a microcosm under siege.
Anna (Madeline Brewer): lesbian comic, Molotov punchlines.
Cynthia (Zoey Deutch): eco-lawyer, dating the token nonwhite boyfriend (Daryl McCormick) who just wants a seat at the adults’ table.
Birdie (McKenna Grace): teenage scientist, still deciding which side of history she’ll pipette.
Paul insists politics stay outside. They don’t. Liz’s book goes viral, birthing a “common-sense” movement with its own flag, its own party, its own corporate sugar daddy. The disease metaphor is blunt—fascism as contagion—but Komasa wields it like a scalpel. Every Thanksgiving argument, every passive-aggressive toast, mirrors the nation’s fever chart.
The first act is a slog of exposition dumped like bad gravy. Swallow it. The back half is a pressure cooker: pregnancies weaponized, tenured chairs stolen, siblings ratting each other out for cushy sinecures while neighbors vanish. One subplot is literally the Leopards Eating Faces tweet in cinematic form.
Komasa doesn’t predict; he projects. Shot in 2023 Ireland (safer to fly mutant flags there), the film feels like I’m Still Here dropped into 1970s Brazil—except the coup is already in motion. Words like “sedition” become rubber stamps for midnight knocks. Smiles calcify into gratitude for the boot.
Diane Lane’s Ellen ages a decade in five years; Kyle Chandler’s Paul learns too late that “no politics at dinner” is surrender. Dynevor’s Liz is silk over venom—every soft “bless your heart” a landmine. The climax hinges on a single, audacious act you’ll either buy or scoff at. Either way, it’ll live rent-free in your head.