Polish director Jan Komasa may be greatest identified in america for his 2019 Oscar-nominated movie “Corpus Christi,” however his greatest box-office success was in Poland for his 2014 movie “Warsaw 44,” concerning the Warsaw Rebellion, the bloody effort by the Polish resistance to expel the occupying German military from town towards the top of World Battle II.
Komasa is aware of authoritarianism in its most flagrant, brutal kinds, however his new movie “Anniversary” imagines a state of affairs by which fascism doesn’t stomp in, jackbooted, however creeps, fairly and ladylike, on kitten-heeled ft. It’s a thought experiment greater than the rest, from a narrative by Komasa and Lori Rosene-Gambino, the latter who wrote the screenplay.
“Anniversary” maps 5 years within the life — and obliteration — of an American household, a microcosm of a bigger speedy political devolution that turns suburban utopia right into a dystopia with a pace that would make your head spin.
Meet the Taylors — we’ll get to know them throughout reunions and celebrations beginning with an anniversary get together for Ellen (Diane Lane) and Paul (Kyle Chandler). She’s a professor at Georgetown, a public mental caught up within the college culture-wars debate; he’s a chef, and so they have 4 kids upon whom they dote: Cynthia (Zoey Deutch, additionally on this week’s “Nouvelle Imprecise”), an environmental lawyer, Anna (Madeleine Brewer), a provocative comic, high-school science nerd Birdie (Mckenna Grace) and brother Josh (Dylan O’Brien), a nebbishy, struggling author. The digital camera knits all of them collectively in lengthy photographs, swirling round their idyllic yard.
Josh has introduced dwelling a brand new girlfriend, Liz (Phoebe Dynevor, of 2023’s “Truthful Play”), who’s rigorously coiffed and poised, immaculately offered and mannered, although her perfection provides his sisters pause. After the introductions, she and Ellen have a quiet, awkward second collectively. As considered one of Ellen’s former college students, Liz wrote a thesis that scandalized the professor, which Ellen describes to her husband as having “radical anti-democratic sentiments,” advocating for a single-party system. The title? “The Change.”
Whereas Liz says she “got here right here with the very best of intentions” and claims she and Josh have been launched by their shared agent, Ellen is suspicious and rightly so. The enigmatic Liz is mild-mannered and quiet, however her concepts are something however. As she hugs Ellen, she whispers, “I was afraid of you however I don’t suppose I’m anymore.” That’s by no means extra clear than when she sends Ellen a replica of her newly printed e-book, “The Change,” devoted to “the haters, the doubters and the educational stranglers.”
Two years later, the Change is formally afoot. Liz is a star, now working with a mysterious group referred to as the Cumberland Firm. She and Josh are married, pregnant with twins, and he’s achieved a conservative glow-up. New flags are popping up within the Taylor’s well-heeled neighborhood and issues are shifting in ways in which make Ellen uncomfortable, enraged even. However within the spirit of politeness and household unity, she acquiesces to Paul’s want for a pleasant household Thanksgiving, regardless of their political variations.
Therein lies what may be “Anniversary’s” greatest warning: Don’t let the fox into the henhouse, even when it appears impolite to not. Ellen maintains an appropriately cautious distance and skepticism of Liz, however Paul’s deadly flaw is his assumption of excellent religion. He hasn’t even learn “The Change” as a result of, frankly, he doesn’t need to know. However as Liz attaches herself to Josh like a parasite, maybe in an try and enact revenge on her former professor, so too do the opposite Taylor kids topple because the nation modifications beneath their ft.
Some would possibly discover “Anniversary” too imprecise: What, exactly, is Liz’s political stance that makes her so highly effective and so repugnant to Ellen? She has advocated for a “single-party system” branded beneath the guise of “solidarity,” however the result’s an autocratic surveillance state that suppresses free speech, upheld by a violent paramilitary police pressure. The movie by no means will get into the specifics, maybe as a result of the one ideology of fascism is the focus of energy. “Anniversary” suggests the rhetoric doesn’t matter after we can activate one another so simply, humanity and freedom crushed beneath such a state.
It’s fascinating that current films that try and grapple with modern sociopolitical points typically feminize the menace: the #MeToo cancel tradition fable “Tár” or this 12 months’s academia scandal movie “After the Hunt.” “Anniversary” situates a nonthreatening lady because the vessel for such evil, at the same time as Liz’s male host, Josh, begins to embody essentially the most excessive outcomes of what she has set in movement.
“Anniversary” is a deeply nihilistic movie that may’t be described as a cautionary story — that horse has already left the barn. Moderately, it’s a hypothetical query as character examine, an examination of how this occurs and an assertion {that a} system like this exhibits no mercy, not even to its most loyal topics, regardless of what we need to imagine.
Walsh is a Tribune Information Service movie critic.
‘Anniversary’
Rated: R, for language all through, some violent content material, drug use and sexual reference
Operating time: 1 hour, 51 minutes
Taking part in: In vast launch Wednesday, Oct. 29
