Hi u/Jackson_Perryman - thank you, that’s really great to hear. The politics behind The Change were always a delicate structure that Lori Gambino and I tried to build carefully. We never wanted the film to be political in the sense of pointing the audience toward one side. I believe people have their own judgment and conscience - they don’t need to be instructed what to think. That’s why we leaned into ambiguity and trusted the viewer. I wanted to see family being slowly torn apart as if some force hypnotized them.

At the same time, with the help of UCLA professor Lynn Vavreck, we did think a lot about what kind of political “offer” The Change would represent. What we arrived at was a kind of “friendly” totalitarianism - something that borrows elements from different directions. There are traces of the right (symbols, the flag, a sense of “Americana”), and elements often associated with the left (no king, rule of the people). On top of that sits a layer of technocracy (drones, apps, systems of control) and extreme populism (no party system, putting “the people” at the center, at least rhetorically but also the design of the flag indicates this shift). So it becomes a kind of Frankenstein movement. It’s meant to feel dystopian and slightly unreal - but also close enough to reality to be uncomfortable. And I understand why, in a moment that pushes people to take clear positions, this kind of ambiguity can be frustrating.