Anniversary

Anniversary (2025) opens with a family dinner and ends with the collapse of a country. Ellen and Paul are celebrating twenty five years of marriage. Ellen's former student Liz appears and starts seeing their son. What Liz belongs to is a movement called The Change. From there the film advances year by year. Each section takes place at the next anniversary dinner, and each time the picture at the table has degraded a little further. The Change is first the idea of a think tank and then the programme of the governing party. The movement's slogan is a no party system. The best thing in the film is how it handles that phrase: a no party system sounds like reconciliation and in practice means one party. The choice of words is how coercion becomes acceptable. Jan Komasa is a Polish director known for Corpus Christi. He watched political polarisation work at close range in his own country, and the detachment here comes from that. Diane Lane and Kyle Chandler carry the marriage. The tension of the film is not on the street, it is at the dinner table. It runs 111 minutes. Good for: political thriller, dystopia, and family drama. Less good for: the tone is bleak, it offers no resolution, and its proximity to current politics will make some viewers uncomfortable.