I’m a fan of a good political thriller, but “Anniversary” is a political thriller that masks itself as a family drama first. That, to me, is an interesting concept. The director and writer Jan Komosa and Lori Rosene-Gambino pull the rug out from viewers masking this film that is one thing but ends up being something completely different. I’m glad that there is enough motivation in the world to give people like these inspirations to create something completely new and original for audiences to either get behind or be mad at. I’m somewhere in the middle, but I’d rather see new ideas than the same old tropes movie fans have seen so many times before.

Liz (Phoebe Dynevor, Fair Play) is a young woman who has a different view on America than most people her age. She wrote a thesis about her ideas, and it caused an issue with her professor Ellen (Diane Lane). Lane’s character didn’t think much of it until her son, Josh (Dylan O’Brien), brought this woman home with him to celebrate his parents’ “Anniversary”. Paul (Kyle Chandler) tries to stuff it off as a mere coincidence, but it’s more than that to the Lane character. She knows how dangerous the mantra was that this woman wrote. The rest of the children at the gathering have other things going on in their lives, so they don’t notice what this can possibly do to their family.

As a person who likes to stay out of the political landscape, I tend not to let my political views get out in the open that much.That being said, I try to pay attention to what is going on in the country. I don’t watch the news that often, but it’s hard not to see what’s going on sometimes.There are a number of different ideals that people have bought into in the last couple of years ever since the Covid-19 pandemic ended. Religious or otherwise. Most of them are pretty dangerous to think about frankly. That’s what this film proposes. A political agenda written as a book called “The Change” A New Social Contract, similar in a way to Mein Kampf, the German doctrine created by Adolf Hitler almost a century ago. The mantra in this book takes over the country in a negative way. This family gets caught up in it because of who has married into and has twins on the way at one point in the film.This divides this family tremendously. 

Besides the cast members I’ve mentioned, there are other ones I haven’t mentioned yet. Birdie (McKenna Grace) is the youngest daughter Cynthia (Zoey Deutch), the oldest child and with Rob (Darryl McCormack), Anna (Madeline Brewer) is a self help public speaker. And there is an Enumerator (Rebecca O’Mara) , a woman who is part of “The Change” movement. All of these characters play a greater role in the bigger picture that this movie is trying to get across. Some of them have very interesting endings to their stories. All of this plays into the end result of this movie.

The film is separated into segments divided by years and, yes, different family anniversaries. Each part of the story takes place a year or two after the last. These advances in time also advance the story forward. At first, things didn’t seem all that bad, but as the movie progresses, the mantra created by the Dynevor character and followed by her husband and father of her children starts to take shape. The country started to change as a result of this. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not in a good way. This story is meant to get certain emotions to come out in the viewer on whatever side we find ourselves in. It’s not pretty no matter how you look at it, and things hit the tipping point when some women show up to talk about the census. Using the census to push their mantra. This was a pretty ugly scene in a film full of ugly scenes.

“Anniversary” depicts a fictional world that the writer & director, Komasa & Rosene-Gambino, wants to warn the country at large about. A similar scenario is kind of taking place in the country right now. She makes it pretty obvious that this family is just the start of something terrible that could potentially happen in our world. We could be fighting against our own brothers and sisters and children. That’s what’s kind of starting to happen right now. I watched this movie, and I was quite disgusted by what I was watching because I saw what’s actually happening in the country. I’m so worried by what the country is turning into. This is definitely a film every American needs to see to be able to look in the mirror and see what we will become if we don’t change something soon. Mainly in our government and the oval office.

4 ½ stars

Dan Skip Allen