Anniversary

The Dinner Table at the End of the World

There’s a very specific dread that sets in before a big family gathering. You straighten napkins. You open the wine. You run through the conversation map in your head and mark the places where it all might blow up. I’ve long suspected the American dining room is one of the most dangerous spaces in the country. Jan Komasa seems to feel the same.

In *Anniversary*, Komasa takes a recognizable family drama and slowly tightens it until it starts breathing like a political thriller. The movie is ambitious, occasionally blunt, and hard to shake. Komasa, coming off *Corpus Christi*, approaches American panic from the outside, and that distance may be why the country’s slide into fascism here feels so clinical. He isn’t interested in cable-news noise or riot spectacle. He watches the poison work on one wealthy Washington D.C. family over five years of dinners, anniversaries, and holiday rituals.



The spark is almost laughably petty at first, which makes it worse. Ellen (Diane Lane), a progressive professor at Georgetown, and her peace-keeping husband Paul (Kyle Chandler), a restaurateur, are celebrating their 25th anniversary when their son Josh (Dylan O'Brien), insecure and flailing, brings home a new girlfriend. Ellen recognizes Liz (Phoebe Dynevor) immediately. Years earlier, Liz was her student, expelled after writing a violently anti-democratic manifesto. Now that same worldview has been polished into a bestseller, and Liz is using Josh as a way back into Ellen’s life. It’s personal vengeance dressed as courtship.

Lane is terrific in that first patio scene. The dialogue matters, sure, but the real performance is happening in her body. Ellen keeps the gracious hostess smile pinned in place while her neck goes rigid and her whole upper body braces against recognition. She offers wine like she might snap the glass in half. Lane plays Ellen not as some spotless liberal conscience, but as a smart woman whose confidence helped blind her to the danger right in front of her.



As the years pass, the country falls into "The Change," the film’s catchall term for an authoritarian one-party surveillance state that Liz helps midwife. Inside the home, Komasa tracks the rot with domestic details. The rooms get barer. The light goes cold. People stop looking one another in the eye.

I don’t think the time-jump device always behaves itself. Squeezing the collapse of a democracy into a handful of Thanksgiving dinners and anniversary speeches forces the script into some blunt explanatory moves. Dustin Rowles at *Pajiba* called it "Project 2025 in cinematic form: one-party rule, 'unity' through the brute elimination of dissent." That’s sharply put, and the movie’s decision to dodge explicit party labels can feel a little evasive. But emotionally, the machinery works.



The deepest horror here isn’t ideology in the abstract. It’s everyday cruelty. Dylan O'Brien’s work as Josh is especially sharp. Early on, he slouches through the room like a man wearing his own failure two sizes too big. A few years later, propped up by Liz’s new order, he stands straighter, talks flatter, and starts treating humiliation as a perk of power. He no longer wants agreement; he wants submission. Chandler, meanwhile, turns Paul’s decency into something much less flattering. He keeps begging everyone to "leave politics at the door," and you can watch that instinct for civility curdle into plain cowardice.

*Anniversary* is not subtle all the time. It swings from sharp observation to outright allegory with a heavy hand. But it understands a grimly useful truth about collapse. Usually it doesn’t arrive with tanks first. It starts when someone tops off the wine, swallows what they know, and decides peace at the table matters more than honesty.