“You have obliterated us. What more do you want?”

In 1976, when I was eight years old and in Year 3, my desk mate, Eva (not her real name), left the country with her family. We also had the same after-school piano teacher, so to an eight-year-old, her absence from my life felt huge. Her departure is seared into my memory. I still remember her angelic face: fair, like that of a fine porcelain doll, accentuating her red lips and rosy cheeks. I can still visualize her empty seat next to mine in our desk beside the window. That was when I learned the word “emigrate”. It was probably also my first inkling that something was wrong with the country I was living in.

In the years that followed, many classmates, friends, and relatives emigrated from apartheid South Africa, typically to countries like Australia, the UK, and Canada, but Eva was the first, and, like all firsts, she has lingered. Although I never saw her again, Eva remained present in my life, like an invisible friend, because she was the first person to leave it.

Whenever I embarked on a huge journey, Eva would come to mind, even if only fleetingly. She has especially been present in recent months as we consider our options should the right-wing populist party, Reform UK, come to power in the next general election, scheduled for 2029. Anniversary, directed by Jan Komasa, is an intense and chilling experience, depicting a rapid descent from life in affluent suburbia to despair in dystopian hell. The foreboding sequence in which Paul Taylor (Kyle Chandler) is driving through their changing neighbourhood in his classic Mercedes-Benz 450 SL, arriving in their driveway only to find that their home of 28 years has been defaced, especially resonated with me. It prompted me to say: Leave!

And in that moment, I felt my old imaginary childhood friend sitting down next to me. Eva will today be a grown woman in her late fifties, but whenever she comes to mind, it is always the pretty eight-year-old girl with the red lips and rosy cheeks who I recall. In my mind, Eva is forever young, forever innocent. Like all the families who left apartheid South Africa, Eva’s wanted a better life in another country. During the intervening years, I have come to learn that life is difficult, wherever you live it. Utopia only truly resides within, and I am thankful that I have had the asylum of an abundant internal life. I don’t know how life turned out for Eva, but I hope that it has been rich and rewarding, and that, at the very least, she has been safe.

Early in the film, when Elizabeth Nettles (Phoebe Dynevor) tells Ellen Taylor (Diane Lane), “I used to be afraid of you, but I don’t think I am anymore”, I wondered: How is this mother-girlfriend rivalry going to end? I speculated about the outcome, even though the history of fascism has repeatedly taught us the answer: It ends badly, for all.

• Anniversary is out on Netflix now