In the annual hurly-burly that is awards season, it’s not uncommon for a lot of smaller, more modest films to fall through the cracks. There are a lot of late-year releases jockeying their way onto screens and eyeballs, and by the time the “qualifying runs” — i.e. the practice of letting a movie play in a closet in Queens for one week, so it technically qualifies to get on the Oscar shortlist — start to kick in, the competition for both industry For-Your-Consideration attention and public recognition becomes cutthroat. Still, you might remember catching a trailer for something called Anniversary this past October. It’s a family drama that starts at the 25th wedding anniversary of Paul and Ellen Taylor. He’s a successful restaurant owner in Baltimore. She’s a college professor at Georgetown. They have four kids, a great house, a good life squarely located in the upper part of upper-middle-class.
Their son Josh, however, has brought home a new girlfriend for the event. She’s Elizabeth, and is introduced practicing friendly, nice-to-meet-you greetings in the mirror. Even without the faux-gentility, she immediately registers as off. Mom eventually recognizes her as a former student who displayed some “radical” ideas. Her presence causes tension at the celebration. “I used to be afraid of you,” she tells Ellen, before admitting she’s no longer intimidated by her. Soon, we see a number of images of the family in turmoil, with this interloper apparently at the center of it all. The trailer ends with a mirror image of the opening shot of Elizabeth now staring into a different mirror, because meta.
The cast is a mixture of recognizable faces (Diane Lane and Friday Nights Lights‘ Kyle Chandler are the parents), medium-recognizable but definitely fan-favorite actors (Dylan O’Brien and Nouvelle Vague‘s Zooey Deutch), and several hot young up-and-comers: Fair Play‘s breakout Phoebe Dynevor plays Elizabeth; McKenna Grace, Madeline Brewer, and Wake Up Dead Man‘s Daryl McCormack round out the supporting players. The vibe is stay-away-from-son-you-Jezebel Lifetime Channel. The promo suggests you’ve seen this type of film before, numerous times, probably hungover on your couch on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Blink, and you may miss a brief shot of an unmarked black SUV pulling up on a tony suburban street, where each house flies an American flag. Not the Old Glory we’ve known for decades, though. These flags place their square of 50 stars dead center within the stripes. Something’s… different here.
This is how Lionsgate pitched Anniversary to audiences, as the sort of handwringing domestic melodrama that’s familiar enough to be comfortable and, for certain demographics, totally dismissable. But it’s less The Housemaid in the Beltway and more The Handmaid’s Tale in an country that looks and feels uncomfortably close to the one outside your door. Polish director Jan Komasa, whose hot-new-priest-in-town movie Corpus Christi nabbed a Best International Feature Oscar nomination in 2020, and screenwriter Lori Rosene-Gambino have come up with a dystopian political thriller in which a MAGA-like movement helps underwrite corporate authoritarianism, all under the guise of aspiring “to put the ‘united’ back in the United States of America.” It begins with a wedding anniversary. It ends with people being led away with bags on their heads.
The conceit is that we’re seeing all of this happen through the lens of a typical happy family torn asunder from external totalitarianism — made all the more personal by the fact that the person arguably responsible for this Orwellian nightmare is one of their own. The Taylors might have stepped right out of those Christmas cards you inevitably get every year, the ones where the whole clan is laughing on a beach somewhere in matching white shirts and denim. Paul likes to dad-dance to Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over.” Mom is loving, though capable of doling her affection out in both tough and nurturing ways, and owns more than one piece of Lululemon garb. Their three daughters run the gamut from Anna (Brewer), an edgy, queer stand-up comedian with a growing fanbase; Cynthia (Deutch), a lawyer married to a handsome fellow legal eagle, Rob (McCormack); and the youngest, Birdie (Grace), a science savant who’s seems to be on the spectrum. Josh (O’Brien) is the only boy, and the only one who seems to have flamed out in terms of realizing his potential. His failure as a writer is a sore spot.
His new girlfriend is also happens to be a writer; Elizabeth and Josh met through their mutual agent. It was a paper she once turned into Ellen, back when she studying at Georgetown, that set off alarm bells. The concept: A two-party political system is way too divisive to be effective. Better to establish a one-party system, which does away with liberal and conservative, left and right. There is only harmony and the Government, and they call the shots. There are numerous way to describe this particular manner of ruling. Ellen settles on “anti-democratic” and “anti-Constitutional.” Word gets around on the so-called “bastion of liberalism” that, per pundits, passes for a modern college campus. Elizabeth eventually leaves college as a social pariah. Mom thinks this whole relationship is pass-agg revenge for what happened.
We’re no longer sure what passes for spoilers any more — is confirming that there are indeed several anniversaries in a movie called Anniversary a spoiler now? — but if you want to go into this thriller totally cold, skip ahead now. At the end of the celebration, Elizabeth gives her future mother-in-law a gift. It’s a book she wrote based on the paper (!), titled “The Change: The New Social Contract.” Fast-forward two years, and this bestseller has become the foundation for a populist movement known simply as “the Change.” A mysterious corporation known as the Cumberland Company has helped promote the far-right ideology and normalized it just enough to give it some ground in the halls of power.
At Thanksgiving dinner, a.k.a. the holiday that’s ground zero for familial discord over political discourse, Josh and a now-pregnant Elizabeth spar with other Taylors over the way her book is warping society. Ellen calls what’s coming a dictatorship. Her son, now a rising figure in the movement, counters that it’s “just a perspective outside your own.” Later, Liz tries to bond with Birdie over the latter’s science project. She’s conducting an experiment in a petri dish, in which some sort of free-radical microbe “is growing a new host for itself to attach to” and feed off of. This is what’s known in the film criticism business as a
Phoebe Dynevor and Dylan O’Brien in ‘Anniversary.’
Lionsgate
There are a number of other stand-out groaner moments in Anniversary like this, from Lane throwing a punk-rock-soundtracked tantrum to a whole subplot that feels like it only exists to get rid of one character and throw another into a catatonic state. Once again, we remind folks that simply raising the volume on a the second half of a line does not equal instant high drama, and not all actors are created equal. But as the film begins to slowly move forward, year by year, it begins to detail the way that totalitarianism gradually chips away at daily life, taken-for-granted liberties, and the pursuit of a happiness that exists outside of what the Change deems acceptable. The few reviewers that wrote about the movie when it slunk into theaters — more on that in a moment — tended to ding Anniversary for not being specific as to what the Change stood for, and felt the vagueness regarding the who, what, where behind the boiling crab-pot’s rising temp was a dealbreaker.
Yet the devil lay in the details we do get. Soon, dissenters are labeled enemies of the state. People disappear, or are disappeared. Internet bandwidth is rationed. Curfews are mandated. “Non-Change” residents in the Taylors’ neighborhood are targeted. Bright, young census surveyors show up and ask insinuating questions, issue casual threats behind gleaming smiles. Things spiral out of control. That menacing variation on the American flag? It’s everywhere you look.
Anniversary ends in tragedy, on a number of levels. And though you might predict where this alt-historical what-if eventually lands, it does a remarkable job of surfing the doomscroll dread that’s now the defining daily emotion for too many of us. Of course Lionsgate, the company putting this film out, wanted to bury the lede in the promotional material (even the poster barely hints at the political aspect). The question is: Did they then try to bury the film itself?
Here’s where things get complicated. The movie was filmed in Dublin in the summer of 2023; it was even given a waiver to shoot during the strike. After Trump was elected, the company sat on the film, unsure of how to bring it to a market already hostile to smaller, non-I.P. titles — much less political hot-button ones. The murder of Charlie Kirk this past September made it especially radioactive, given how anyone or anything that seemed even remotely critical of those associated with the far-right, MAGA, or the current administration after that assassination was subject to harassment or persecution. Anniversary did get a premiere — there are pictures of it online, with a few actors in attendance — and a release in 800 theaters, per an agreement between the producers and Lionsgate. The trades weighed in, but as The Wrap reported, numerous prominent outlets didn’t acknowledge it at all. Other than the trailer playing before other Lionsgate titles in theaters, there was virtually no marketing at all.
If an incendiary look at the way populist talking points and authoritarian policies can be merged into a nightmare of state-sanctioned violence and repression falls in the forest and no one even knows there was a falling tree in the first place, much less see or hear it plummet, does it even exist at all? Lane, to her credit (and her credit as a producer), has been out there talking about the movie. She’s proud of it, as well she should be. And she’s notably frustrated that it seems to have been the victim of self-censorship due to the current atmosphere or pervasive media-company cowardice, as well she should be. Per the Wrap piece, the film was given a theatrical run due to an agreement that would allow it end up on Hulu, where the notion was that it would find an audience better as a streaming audience — but certainly not the bigger audience it deserves. As of this writing, it is not on Hulu. You can, however, rent the film on Apple, YouTube, Amazon, and GooglePlay, assuming you knew you had to search it out in the first place. Anniversary is still being somewhat hidden by those responsible for getting it in front of viewers. But it’s hidden in plain sight, and now that you do know it’s there, you’re encouraged to seek it out while you still have the opportunity.
