Over the course of this movie, the Taylor family will be destroyed.

At first, they get together for the parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. Georgetown professor Ellen (Diane Lane) and restaurateur Paul (Kyle Chandler), attended by their four children: lawyer Cynthia (Zoey Deutch) and her husband Rob (Daryl McCormack); out lesbian stand up Anna (Madeline Brewer); young scientist Birdie (Mckenna Grace) and failed writer Josh (Dylan O’Brien) and his fiancee Liz (Phoebe Dynevor), who was once one of Ellen’s students.

Liz surprises Ellen by gifting her with her new book, written with Josh’s help: The Change: The New Social Contract. The cover shows an American flag with the stars centered, supposedly to represent Americans uniting around the political center. Instead, it leads to a one-party system that is somehow even more fascist than the fascist state we live in right now.

Within a few years, The Change has taken over the United States, and everyone worries about the future. Liz gives Birdie a password to a noted virology database to help her in her career and eventually gets her an internship with the Cumberland Corporation, which has sponsored this movement. Yet Ellen won’t play nice; she vandalizes The Change flags and eventually gets confronted so many times that she goes missing.

As time passes, Josh becomes more assured and changes into nearly an archenemy to the family. Cynthia gets pregnant but aborts the child without telling her husband. As if these family gatherings couldn’t be more tense, Ellen tells Liz that if she messes with her family, she will kill her.

Eventually, The Change has taken over the country and soon, the world. Enumerators come to the house, looking for Anna, while Cynthia is drugged out of her mind. Birdie uses her knowledge of viruses to suicide bomb a bio-weapon attack at the Washington, D.C., Cumberland headquarters while the family is gathered for the 30th anniversary. Police arrive and begin attacking people; Cynthia stabs Josh, and the parents are arrested, their heads bound like the painting they met in front of, René Magritte’s The Lovers.

Wow, right?

Directed by Oscar nominee Jan Komasa (Corpus Christi, The Hater), the film is a brutal political allegory that uses a 10-year timeline to show how quickly civilized society can pivot into authoritarianism through the lens of one family’s collapse. The tension between Ellen and Liz  isn’t just political. It’s a personal vendetta. Liz was a former student whom Ellen once publicly humiliated for her radical one-party thesis. The Change movement is, in many ways, Liz’s long-game revenge against her former mentor.

Interestingly, the film never specifies if The Change is far-right or far-left. Komasa intentionally kept the ideology vague to focus on the mechanics of fascism: the vertical flags, the stars in the center (symbolizing the death of federalism) and the way neighbors turn on neighbors.

I saw this on a plane and had no expectations. Obviously, Lionsgate buried this. How would you sell it today? Polish director Jan Komasa makes this melodramatic yet in the finest ways. It’s a powder keg, and I couldn’t believe these things were happening in a modern film. Do what you can to find this.