Anniversary: A Banal Statement on Our Toxic Political Path

Quick to capitalize on the runaway success of his religious redemption film Corpus Christi, young Polish filmmaker Jan Komasa wasted no time with a follow-up feature in the chamber for the pandemic days of 2020 in the form of The Hater. And while the same prolificness would not follow that release, the five-year gap in Komasa’s resumé would not pass in vain for his curious observers; barely a month after the world premiere of his English-language debut Good Boy, the director has already returned with the release of another cold commentary on the lamentable state of things.

This context for Komasa’s filmography matters because there seems to be a pervading pattern across this oeuvre as he moves into the 2020s; ending the previous decade with a rumination on restoration from a troubled past, Komasa’s primary focus in the “Trump really isn’t going anywhere, is he?” age seems something of a cynical warning call on the corruptibility that faces our future. Whether it’s the horrors of cyberspace toxicity or the forced rehabilitation of a young criminal, Komasa finds himself gawking out the window as he drives along the violent path set ahead, and Anniversary is his attempt to unpack how that path comes to be unsuspectingly laid forth as the only option left to us.

Perhaps “unsuspectingly” isn’t the right word for it, as virtually everybody in the Taylor family seems fairly unreceptive to the new movement that’s about to sweep their lives. That movement comes courtesy of Liz (Dynevor), and that movement enters their lives by way of her relationship with the family’s son Josh (Dylan O’Brien); the only son in an affluent Washington, D.C. family, Josh is basically living off his parents when their 25th wedding anniversary offers the opportunity for him to introduce them to his new girlfriend with startlingly radical political ideas.

Of course, Josh’s mother Ellen (Lane), a Georgetown professor, is well acquainted with Liz’s ideas, as she is in fact a former student of hers, whose anti-democratic thesis was subject of much discourse and scorn at the time. None of this sets off any red flags for Josh, however—in fact, Liz’s ideology gives him purpose to raise flags of his own, and the cultural phenomenon that is the wildly successful publication of “The Change” comes to have shattering consequences on this family, just as it does on the rest of American society as a whole.

This is a fairly ambitious undertaking from Komasa, not least of all because Lori Rosene-Gambino’s script keeps the impacts of this fascist uprising largely bottled within the confines of this lakeside family home; Anniversary, as its title implies, begins on a wedding anniversary and then continues to jump forward in yearly or bi-yearly increments to check in on the status of (d)evolving affairs through the prism of a family torn apart from the inside. To examine a dystopian shift in American politics from the perspective of a single family made to choose sides is an intriguing focal point for examining the intimate scope of these ideological movements that have reverberating effects on us all, but it’s also an angle that feels woefully thin.

Primarily acting as a showcase for its cast, Anniversary doesn’t leave its players with much to do beyond argue, mope around and recite the dangers that the film’s themes are attempting to relay. Zoey Deutch plays one of the family sisters and, as usual, finds ways to do so much with so little, but the development of her arc as a wife who sees her husband’s perspective slowly poisoning right before her eyes isn’t given the chance to simmer because of the script’s leap-frogging structure. So when the time comes for tears to start flying in the rain, Komasa is unable to find his actors the breathing room to give their histrionics the weight needed to bypass the realm of half-baked political theatre, washed-out even further by the film’s streamer-ready grey lighting.

As far as the film’s politics themselves, Anniversary flashes its potential to underscore the dangers of a persuasive evil and our ability to just let things slide until they come to be too late to change. Potential, however, only takes these efforts so far when the film’s commentary on the threat of milquetoast centrism itself proves to be undermined by the scope of its analysis. In Rosene-Gambino’s script, its refusal to pick a side out of discomfort is relegated to “No politics at the dinner table”—a useful microcosm for the greater issue, but the metaphor can only be taken so seriously when the ineffectiveness of table-side debate evolves into voiceover detailing the disappearance of a standup comedian family member under the guise of state sedition.

That Anniversary is set in the household of such a well-to-do family is itself a fascinating place for the film’s ideas to germinate; suppression is, after all, a tool sharpened and maintained behind the walls of wealth. The film’s failure to truly interrogate the sense of complicity that comes with that perspective, though, leaves Jan Komasa unable to sharpen his own political manifesto into anything more daring than “Pick the right side.” Saying as much is a good start, but showing us the true scope of why that choice is so necessary would go a hell of a lot further in ensuring that the message sticks around to keep a chill in our bones.

still courtesy of Lionsgate

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Julian Malandruccolo

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