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“Anniversary” traces the unraveling of a modern American family when a newcomer, whose increasingly influential writing advances a radical, anti-democratic belief system, brings their ideology uncomfortably close to home. Oscar-nominated Jan Komasa aspires to offer a sweeping moral and political commentary, but his execution proves uneven; where he succeeds most is at evoking the unsettling possibility that loyalty, kinship, and home itself cannot be trusted.

We meet the Taylors, liberal D.C. archetypes, at the 25th wedding anniversary of Ellen (Diane Lane), a Georgetown professor and the family’s matriarch, and her husband Paul (Kyle Chandler), a genial restaurateur in an unmistakably supporting role. A whirlwind introduction to the rest of the family follows: Cynthia (Zoey Deutch) and her husband Rob (Daryl McCormack), high-achieving environmental lawyers; Anna (Madeline Brewer), a caustically witty comedian; Birdie (Mckenna Grace), an aspiring scientist; and Josh (Dylan O’Brien), the family’s disappointing writer, whose ambitions never quite materialized. Josh brings home a new girlfriend, Liz (Phoebe Dynevor), and from the opening seconds — with Liz testing out warmth and sincerity in the mirror as if deciding which self to wear — the film cues us to see her not as a guest, but as a calculated disruption.

Liz, we soon learn, was once Ellen’s student. Ellen flagged her thesis advocating a one-party system as anti-democratic, a critique that ultimately pushed Liz out of Georgetown. Eight years later, Liz has transformed that thesis into a forthcoming book entitled “The Change: The New Social Contract.” Within two years, her book becomes a surprise bestseller. By year three, The Change has become the ideological default. Komasa and screenwriter Lori Rosene-Gambino write The Change as an intentionally vague strain of fascism, untethered from the left or right. As a result, the political fear they reach for feels diluted, especially when compared to stories like “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “1984,” which terrify precisely because they are rooted in fully imagined systems of belief.

The film unfolds in discontinuous acts, and with each time jump, Liz’s once-speculative ideas metastasize into political reality. Komasa’s narrative structure borrows from theater — his father was a stage actor. He was drawn, he explained in an interview with IndieWire, to the theatrical experience of returning from intermission to the same living room and the same people, but a year has passed, and their world has changed. On screen, however, this yields mixed results. Rather than inviting the viewer to intuit what happened between anniversaries as intended, the jumps often feel like cheap, haphazard devices.

Much conversation around the film has highlighted how prescient it feels in the context of America’s brittle political climate. Fittingly, “Anniversary” saw an unusually limited release, perhaps because it was deemed too risky for this moment: In an interview with The Wrap, a representative from Gersh talent agency, which represents Komasa, stated that, “The film was buried [by Lionsgate] because it is incendiary. To me, it’s a sign of the world we live in.” With little to no marketing, it was released quietly into 800 theaters, opening to just $259,180, an average of $352 per screen.

Ironically, “Anniversary” actually has surprisingly little to say about real-world politics. The film conjures a post-democratic America, but offers little scaffolding to explain how it arrives there. This world, where descent into tyranny is induced by an undergraduate thesis-turned-policy book published by a shady think tank — the foreboding Cumberland Corporation — is inconsistent with the forces that underwrite political transformation in reality: charismatic leadership, populist grievance, and emotional mobilization.

The film shines when it stops striving for allegory — it is often heavy-handed, and particularly intent on metaphors of virology — and fully commits to its psychological core. What “Anniversary” captures convincingly is how authoritarianism is enacted through families, rather than imposed upon them. Judging by the marketing, you might reasonably expect Liz to be the film’s center of gravity. Yet, while Liz catalyzes The Change and the downfall of the Taylor family, she never feels like the omnipotent architect of the movement she sets in motion. For most of the film, she lingers at the margins. This is not a flaw, exactly. Liz’s opacity allows her to function as a presence rather than a character — an external force that shifts the balance of power in the home.

After slow initial exposition, “Anniversary” finds its footing not as a political thriller, but as a domestic one. Ellen says that people never change, but the family members that she thought she knew best all do: They deflate into shells of their former selves, become vigilantes, become the enemy. Josh, convincingly sociopathic and drunk on his new-found power, terrorizes at family meals. Rob turns against his wife, Cynthia, abandoning her to a sleeping pill-induced stupor. The film rarely leaves the grounds of the Taylor home, which is perhaps a product of its indie budget limitations. But when not approached as a political microcosm, and simply as a story of a family imploding, “Anniversary” delivers.