Reblogged from the Movie Isle Website: https://themovieisle.com/2025/11/21/film-review-anniversary-2025/

Terrific review by A.W. Kautzer

A family is torn apart in the Anniversary, the new thriller starring Diane Lane, Kyle Chandler and Madeline Brewer. 

It should be said upfront, Anniversary, the new film from Polish Filmmaker Jan Komasa, is not for everyone.  Komasa has made a film that slowly turns the noose around the shiny veneer of upper-middle-class existence and freedom until it’s left gasping for its final breaths.  The spiritual cousin to the director’s Polish language film, The Hater, finds similar grounds for the weaponization of social tools against society and the fallout. 

Many will find this more horror film than a thriller as the screenplay by Lori Rosene-Gambino, with a story by Komasa gives no quarter to the sinking of this family and the world writ large.  Told with a sobering, almost clinical style, the film is suffocatingly dark and hopeless as we watch the rise of authoritarianism from the family’s perspective.  

It may feel all too real for many who are prone to doomscrolling social media.  For others Anniversary will be an astute, sobering thriller.