For his wealthy parents’ silver wedding anniversary shindig, the underachieving Josh (Dylan O’Brien, Saturday Night) brings his ambitious new girlfriend, Liz (Phoebe Dynevor, 2023’s Fair Play). This would be extra cause for celebration, if not for Liz’s past as a rather adversarial student of Josh’s college-professor mom, Ellen (Diane Lane, Untraceable).
Ellen relays the whole story to her husband (Kyle Chandler, Game Night): Liz’s thesis at Georgetown advocated for a single-party nation, which Ellen still finds dangerous and unconstitutional. If such radical ideology took hold, the stereotypical “you’re not good enough for my son” would run second to “you’re a cancer to our country.”
If that doesn’t sound like your idea of entertainment in today’s up-is-down environment (“Isn’t Thanksgiving dinner already fucked-up enough?”), you’re correct. No matter your politics, Anniversary is a major, major downer.
Inadvertently, it’s also one of the nuttiest, most histrionic mainstream movies of immediate recall. As it progresses from mere in-family friction to full-blown Orwellian nightmare, Polish director/co-writer Jan Komasa (2019’s Oscar-nommed Corpus Christi) loses hold of the reins. By the time one character goes undercover as a party clown, or Chandler delivers a Bad Movie Monologue for the ages (“NAME THE DOG! NAME THE DOG! NAME THE DOG!”), I half-wondered if my Lunesta had kicked in. It had not.
Lane and company deserve better material — much better. That said, as heavy-handed and overblown as Anniversary is, I’d rather it be those than, you know, prescient. —Rod Lott