Anniversary Turns Celebration to Fracture

Anniversary

★ ★ ½

Anniversary examines what happens when an outsider enters a tight-knit family and topples its balance completely. It rarely ceases to be compelling and is often disturbing. The film explores how our political beliefs, when taken to extremes, can rip a family apart, causing tension and intrinsic division. The drama is well written, the acting is captivating, and the result is devastation and heartbreak.

Paul (Kyle Chandler) and Ellen Taylor (Diane Lane) are celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary, and the entire family – all of their children – come home to celebrate. Their youngest, Birdie (Mckenna Grace), is a budding viral biologist, living at home while finishing school. Anna (Madeline Brewer) is a stand-up comedian whose star is rising. The film alludes to her jokes centering on a distaste for current politics. Cynthia (Zoey Deutch) and her long-term boyfriend Rob (Daryl McCormack) are environmental lawyers. Their son, Josh (Dylan O’Brien), arrives with his latest romance, Elizabeth (Liz) Nettles (Phoebe Dynevor).

Phoebe Dynevor as Elizabeth Nettles
© 2025 Lionsgate

Ellen knows Liz very well. She was her professor at Georgetown University and publicly challenged Liz, calling her out on the extreme writing in her term paper. Ellen finds Liz’s ideas dangerous to democracy—favoring a one-party system over a two-party one. Ellen and Liz never get off on the right foot and Ellen makes it apparent that she wants her out of her son’s life.

Two years later, Josh has married Liz, whose book, The Change, sparks a firestorm of ideological and societal shifts. Ellen finds the book appalling, Paul won’t read it, because he takes a neutral political stance. The rest of the family is divided or unconvinced where they stand. Now eight months pregnant with twin boys—something that should be joyous—Liz instead stands at the center of a family slowly torn apart by their evolving ideology and Ellen’s seething distaste of Liz.

Over time, Josh’s confidence curdles into arrogance. Once a calm, level-headed young man, he becomes increasingly obsessed with Liz’s ideas. He becomes a dark, unsettling presence within the family and seems to relish the new power he’s found as the outside world drifts toward totalitarian rule.

Diane Lane as Ellen and Kyle Chandler as Paul
© 2025 Lionsgate

The film is a brutal, unrelenting look at a family torn apart as social change shakes their world to the core. The result is the complete fracture of a once-happy, if semi-dysfunctional, family. Though Ellen claims to be neither conservative nor liberal, the family is quasi-united in one form of progressivism or another.

Though the film never states outright where democracy’s downfall began, it uses a certain color with obvious disdain. It would have been better to present it ambiguously. We didn’t necessarily need to know what Liz’s ideals were, just that Ellen disliked them. Most of us can relate, at least on some level, to a family member whose views clash with our own—especially in our current political climate. A more ambiguous approach might inspire more discussion. Here it might do the opposite.

Making a political film is always difficult, and whether you enjoy Anniversary, beyond the excellent acting and dramatic staging, will probably depend on which of the characters you most align with. It might spark conversation—or deepen the divide. Which one you choose is up to you. Great drama shouldn’t have to choose sides—and Anniversary sometimes forgets that.