'Anniversary' review: beware of your authoritarian new girlfriend

Polish director Jan Komasa may be best known in the United States for his 2019 Oscar-nominated film “Corpus Christi,” but his biggest box office success was in Poland for his 2014 film “Warsaw 44,” about the Warsaw Uprising, the bloody effort by the Polish resistance to drive the occupying German army from the city toward the end of World War II.

Komasa knows authoritarianism in its most flagrant and brutal forms, but his new film “Anniversary” imagines a scenario in which fascism does not burst in with jackboots, but rather crawls along, pretty and feminine, on kitten heels. It is more than anything a thought experiment, based on a story by Komasa and Lori Rosene-Gambino, the latter author of the script.

“Anniversary” charts five years in the life (and destruction) of an American family, a microcosm of a broader rapid political devolution that turns suburban utopia into dystopia with a speed that might make your head spin.

Meet the Taylors: We'll meet them through gatherings and celebrations starting with an anniversary party for Ellen (Diane Lane) and Paul (Kyle Chandler). She is a professor at Georgetown, a public intellectual caught up in the university debate over the culture wars; is a chef, and they have four children whom they adore: Cynthia (Zoey Deutch, also in this week's “Nouvelle Vague”), an environmental lawyer, Anna (Madeleine Brewer), a provocative comedian, high school science nerd Birdie (Mckenna Grace), and her brother Josh (Dylan O'Brien), a dim-witted, struggling writer. The camera joins them all in long takes, circling around their idyllic backyard.

Josh has brought home a new girlfriend, Liz (Phoebe Dynevor, from 2023's “Fair Play”), who is carefully coiffed and poised, immaculately presented and polite, although her perfection makes her sisters doubt. After the introductions, she and Ellen spend a quiet, awkward moment together. As a former student of Ellen's, Liz wrote a thesis that scandalized the professor, with Ellen describing her husband as having “radical anti-democratic feelings” and advocating a one-party system. The title? “Change.”

While Liz says she “came here with the best of intentions” and claims that she and Josh were introduced by their shared agent, Ellen is suspicious and right. The enigmatic Liz is gentle and calm, but her ideas are anything but. As he hugs Ellen, he whispers, “I used to be afraid of you, but I don't think I am anymore.” That is never more clear than when he sends Ellen a copy of his newly published book, “The Change,” dedicated to “the haters, the doubters, and the academic stranglers.”

Two years later, the Shift is officially underway. Liz is a celebrity and now works with a mysterious organization called the Cumberland Company. She and Josh are married, pregnant with twins, and he has achieved a conservative glow. New flags are appearing in Taylor's wealthy neighborhood and things are changing in ways that make Ellen uncomfortable, even enraged. But in the spirit of civility and family unity, he agrees to Paul's wish for a nice family Thanksgiving, despite their political differences.

Therein lies what might be “Anniversary’s” biggest warning: Don’t let the fox into the henhouse, even if it seems rude not to. Ellen maintains an appropriately cautious distance and skepticism toward Liz, but Paul's fatal flaw is his good-faith assumption. He hasn't even read “The Change” because, frankly, he doesn't want to know. But as Liz becomes parasitically attached to Josh, perhaps in an attempt to get revenge on her former teacher, Taylor's other children also fall as the nation changes beneath their feet.

Some might find “Anniversary” too vague: What, precisely, is Liz's political stance that makes her so powerful and so repugnant to Ellen? He has advocated for a “one-party system” disguised as “solidarity,” but the result is an autocratic surveillance state that suppresses free speech, sustained by a violent paramilitary police force. The film never goes into details, perhaps because the only ideology of fascism is the concentration of power. “Anniversary” suggests that rhetoric doesn't matter when we can turn against each other so easily, with humanity and freedom crushed under such a state.

Fascinatingly, recent films that attempt to address contemporary sociopolitical issues often feminize the threat: the #MeToo cancel culture fable “Tár” or this year’s academic scandal film “After the Hunt.” “Anniversary” positions a non-threatening woman as the vessel of such evil, even as Liz’s male host, Josh, begins to embody the more extreme results of what she has set in motion.

“Anniversary” is a deeply nihilistic film that cannot be described as a warning: That horse is out of the barn. Rather, it is a hypothetical question as a character study, an examination of how this happens, and an assertion that a system like this shows no mercy, even to its most loyal subjects, despite what we want to believe.

Walsh is a film critic for the Tribune News Service.