Anniversaries are often meant to be celebrated, not dreaded. Ellen (Diane Lane) and Paul Taylor (Kyle O’Chandler) are celebrating 25 years of beautiful holy matrimony, surrounded by their children and extended friends. Life is pretty idyllic for the family; Ellen is a tenured professor at Georgetown, Paul owns a successful restaurant. Their eldest daughter, Anna (Madeline Brewer) makes a living as a comedian, middle daughter Cynthia (Zoey Deutch) as an environmentalist alongside hubby Rob (Daryl McCormack), and youngest daughter Birdie (McKenna Grace) is a budding scientist. Sole son Josh (Dylan O’Brien) writes sci-fi and seems to be in some sort of writer’s block.

Who Josh brings to the party is of interest. His new girlfriend, Liz Nettles (Phoebe Dynevor) is also part writer/part activist. She’s also a former student of Ellen’s who was expelled for radical ideas found in her thesis titled “The Change: Birth of a New Nation.” Now a book, the change is beginning to embed itself into the American nation, building into an unstoppable movement. Liz’s constant presence in the Turner clan transforms their relationships into something unrecognizable and potentially beyond repair.

Major horror releases during spooky season have been sparse this year compared to years past. Anniversary is obviously not a movie that carries the horror genre tag, but there’s an unease watching the way the movie plays out knowing it’s not inconceivable for our current nation status to be the same in the near future. It’s at times rudimentary in its story framing and slightly sensationalized, but worthy of a view.

Polish filmmaker Jan Komasa continues his expansion into the states by releasing his second film wide within the year following Good Boy (not the recent horror flick starring a dog). Shot in Dublin, Ireland, the neighborhood does look a bit removed in the medium-wide shots from what is supposed to be Northern Virginia. But Komasa, production designer Lucy van Lonkhuyzen, and cinematographer Piotr Sobociński Jr. make the spacious, elegant home an important character of the feature. At first introduced as a warm and expansive gathering site, it devolves into something that resembles a theoretical prison. The color desaturates, the weather is consistently either in a downpour or depressingly overcast, and the home becomes more and more heavy emotionally.

Anniversary largely takes place over the span of five years, filmed in defined acts sans title cards. Your mileage may vary depending on your vantage point, but there is an accidental, mildly dark comedic undercurrent knowing like clockwork that every anniversary will inevitably end in disaster. Lori Rosene-Gambio’s script suffers a bit from the confines of the film’s calcified structure, and it takes getting used to how information about the broader world is revealed in short, narration-driven scenes that bring us to speed on what’s happened in the world in-between the last time we saw the Taylor’s. Even then, though the feature is intensely focused on the micro of how a family deals with a changing political landscape, the rapid change of the macro society begs the question and exploration of what specifically happened to spur the country to become “change agents.”

Similar in a sense to last year’s Civil War, when your movie ostensibly creates two sides with a lot of ideological lore under the surface, I think it’s fair to want a little more story meat to how we’ve arrived to the societal point(s) the movie is at. But in a way, the unsaid does make it a little more frightening, and as the movie goes on, this want stays as a want and doesn’t become a need because the ensemble performances are very strong and committed.

Lane and Chandler are industry vets who rarely turn in work that isn’t good at minimum. Some characters, like Deutch’s and Brewer’s, are more in the foreground but get those one-to-two moments of highlighted focus that each makes their own. That said, the three biggest standouts are Grace, who more than holds her own as the youngest of the main cast as Birdie, Dynevor, chilling as the cunning, opportunistic ideological architect, and O’Brien as the latter’s tool for dispersing her message. His radical change is arguably the scariest part of the feature, beginning as a directionless man in a crisis of confidence and ending as an unyielding man who is swimming in arrogance. With his recent performances in last year’s Saturday Night, this year’s still-underseen Twinless and now this, O’Brien is someone whom I have my eye on now with any new project he’s a part of.

Do yourself a favor and pass on the trailer of Anniversary, as it’s not the greatest representation of what the film is. By the end of it, the filmmaking choices coalesced enough to make it stick with me after completion, and the discussions that come out of this upon release should be intriguing.

B

Photo credits go to impawards.com, collider.com, firstshowing.net, and courtesy of Lionsgate.