There are few cinematic horrors more unsettling than a family dinner gone wrong. In Anniversary, the pot roast may be warm, but the ideology is ice cold. Jan Komasa’s English-language debut doesn’t ease into its premise — it detonates it, slowly and mercilessly, over the course of five years. What starts as a cringey, awkward backyard celebration devolves into a full-blown domestic dystopia, where trust is exploited, history is rewritten, and dinner-table small talk spirals into fascist allegiance.

The Taylors aren’t exactly extraordinary — and that’s the point. Ellen (Diane Lane, Serenity) and Paul (Kyle Chandler, Carol) are liberal-leaning, wine-drinking, culturally upper-middle class Americans. Their four adult children have scattered into varying flavors of independence, each harboring their own unspoken resentments and disappointments.

But when their son Josh (Dylan O’Brien, Twinless) brings home a new girlfriend, Liz (Phoebe Dynevor, Fair Play), the family’s sense of order begins to quietly unspool. Ellen recognizes her from years earlier — a former student who once advocated for a one-party government in a classroom essay so radical, she was expelled. Now the budding author is back with a mysterious book in hand and an unsettling calm that suggests she’s been planning this reintroduction for a while.

The book is The Change: The New Social Contract. A best-seller. A movement. A warning. And eventually, the blueprint for a United States transformed into something unrecognizable — except to those who’ve been watching the headlines for the last decade.

If this sounds like a slippery-slope political allegory, it is. But Anniversary doesn’t hammer its message with capital-letter declarations or viral montage sequences. It’s scarier than that. The story plays out in time-jumps, each family gathering revealing how far the country — and this household — has slid toward totalitarianism. The flag changes. The dinner conversations get more clipped. The walls grow barer. The children get colder.

Lane is the film’s center of gravity, and she gives a career-highlight performance. Her Ellen is brilliant, stubborn, a little elitist, but deeply principled. You feel the cost of every choice she makes, especially as the system she once believed in folds underneath her. Lane does more with a single shift of eye contact than most actors can with three pages of dialogue. If this one doesn’t land her another Oscar nomination (and it most likely won’t), we’re all living in the wrong timeline and not paying attention to the kind of roles actresses in Lane’s peer group are excelling at.

O’Brien, though, is the film’s ticking time bomb. Josh begins the story as a failure — unsure of his writing, craving validation. He ends it in a designer suit, preaching unity while his eyes betray a near-religious zealotry. His transformation is one of the most chilling I’ve seen onscreen this year. O’Brien doesn’t overplay the shift — he lets the posture evolve, the diction harden, the smiles linger a bit too long. It’s a haunting portrayal of what happens when insecurity curdles into dogma.

Director Komasa (Corpus Christi) knows a thing or two about societies unraveling. Here, he and screenwriter Lori Rosene-Gambino find horror not in spectacle, but in domestic erosion. Thanksgiving morphs into surveillance. A family photo becomes a symbol of betrayal. The river behind the house, once scenic, becomes an escape route.

The film’s production design subtly mirrors the decay. By the third time-jump, you start to notice the missing bookshelves, the emptied rooms. Lucy van Lonkhuyzen’s sets and Piotr Sobociński Jr.’s cinematography trap these characters in their own curated hell. Even the lighting shifts from natural warmth to a kind of sterile menace. It’s deeply effective, and it makes you lean forward — just in time for the walls to close in.

Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans’ score underlines the dread without ever calling attention to itself. It hums, it waits, and then — when needed — it screams. Much like the film’s excellent ensemble, which deepens the tension with lived-in, layered performances. Madeline Brewer, Zoey Deutch (The Threesome), and Mckenna Grace (Crater) play the Taylor sisters with just the right balance of connection and conflict — each one navigating this family collapse in her own worrisome way. Daryl McCormack (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande), as Cynthia’s well-meaning husband, brings a warmth that becomes harder to hold onto as the years pass.

Some will dismiss Anniversary as heavy-handed or too on-the-nose. And sure, it doesn’t hide its influences. But Komasa isn’t trying to disguise the warning. He’s broadcasting it. This is a slow-burn political thriller disguised as a family drama — or maybe the other way around — and it understands that ideological rot doesn’t always begin in city halls or war rooms. Sometimes, it starts with a well-meaning son giving his mother a book.

By the final act, the tension becomes almost unbearable. Some of it is plot, sure. But most of it comes from the slow realization that this future feels very close. Uncomfortably so. The dinner table as battleground. Love as leverage. Safety as strategy.

Will this film be polarizing? Absolutely. Should it be? Also yes. When audiences are more comfortable watching AI battles or multiverse escapism than they are seeing families fracture under ideological pressure, that’s not an indictment of the film. It’s a sign of how fragile we already are.

Anniversary isn’t just a cautionary tale. It’s a litmus test. A mirror. A scream muffled behind polite conversation. And like the best political thrillers, it lingers. I hope we can look back on this one day and say, “That almost happened.” But watching it now, I’m not so sure.