ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER - Mark Reviews Movies

One Battle After Another, Warner Bros. Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 25, 2025

Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson puts forth so many ideas, presents so many seemingly contradictory goals and tones, and tells such an expansive story with One Battle After Another that, in theory, the film shouldn't function. Just the thematic weight of this tale, in which Anderson looks at the state of modern politics by way of a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland, seems a heavy burden for any movie at this particular moment, but this film tackles our current climate, pins it to the ground, forces us to witness it, and encourages us both to laugh at its inherent absurdity and to realize that we're in it for the long haul.

Then again, every country and society throughout history was or still is in that kind of conflict for as long as "civilized" humanity has existed. Pynchon's novel was about radicals from the 1960s dealing with the '80s. Meanwhile, Anderson has shifted the backdrop of the so-called War on Drugs then to the paranoia, fear-mongering, and ever-increasing authoritarianism surrounding immigration of today.

Anderson had to have finished this film before the current administration's most recent and, apparently, endlessly evolving efforts (ones that are Constitutionally questionable or outright counter to everything in that document), so it's quite noteworthy how prescient the filmmaker was in seeing exactly where things would go. It is, though, equally terrifying to realize that even his story's prologue seems to be set in the future. The only thing that could possibly make the film more relevant is if the sitting administration tries to ban it in some way (At this point, no one should be surprised if such discussions occur).

If this sounds weighty and heavy-handed, the most impressive feat of a film filled with many, perhaps, is that it is the former quality while never becoming the latter. The narrative here is about incredibly serious matters—about governmental overreach and how it deepens political divides and the way that everyone who once believed in something will become too comfortable or scared to care about pretty much anything. The screenplay, though, frames it both within the plot of non-stop chase and as a satire that is downright silly at times.

A film this heavy probably shouldn't be capable of moving with such unceasing momentum and doing so while also feeling light on its feet. However, this one, a miracle just in that regard, does.

The basic plot is about the deeds of the past returning to haunt the present. All of that is set up in a prologue that establishes the flexible tone, the breakneck pacing, and, of course, the characters and stakes of the film. We meet a left-wing militia called the French 75, who raid migrant detention centers, detain the law enforcement officials there, and free any immigrants being held on the premises.

The group's de facto leader is Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), which would seem to be a codename until we meet some of the other characters—whose monikers and the names of their associations constantly remind us that we are in the realms of satire and allegory, as pertinent to reality as everything may seem. She's in a relationship with the group's explosives expert, whom we'll call Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), because that's the name he'll soon adopt when the militia's ideals and artillery result in inevitable bloodshed.

That first infiltration mission puts the group on the wrong side of Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), whose entire body seems to be locked in standing-at-attention posture (Penn's performance is a marvel here, existing as a patently ridiculous caricature and a genuinely menacing threat). He may hate the group, but Lockjaw becomes infatuated with Perfidia. She becomes pregnant, and through assorted bits of extortion and simple threats, the question is whether the biological father of the baby is Bob or Lockjaw.

The real plot, though, is set 16 years after all of this, as Bob, constantly high or drunk or both, is a single father to Willa (Chase Infiniti, in an impressive movie debut). The two are in hiding after Perfidia left them, killed someone during a bank robbery, and fled the country. Bob is overly protective of his daughter, and when Lockjaw comes looking for the two of them to discover if the teenage girl will be a problem for his initiation into a white-supremacist group, the aging, apathetic former revolutionary's suspicions that someone will come to get him turn out to be completely justified.

From there, the rest of the plotting is a continual chase, as Willa tries to find safety with the aid of Bob's old comrade Deandra (Regina Hall), Bob attempts to reunite with his daughter, and everyone has to evade Lockjaw, who has local law enforcement and federal agents—all of them militarized, active in the streets of cities, and trampling any protests against them—on his side. It's a bit difficult to see Lockjaw's sections of the narrative as fitting in with Anderson's speculative, over-the-top vision of the future of the United States, but it's not the filmmaker's fault that reality caught up to his satire so quickly, when it should never have in the first place, for that matter.

Anyway, the film is thrilling, as Anderson stages assorted chases amidst and around civil unrest and military-style activities, and rich in just how many characters it introduces, with all of them having some eccentricity or quality that makes each them stand out. Benicio Del Toro, for example, plays a martial arts instructor and part-time "Latino Harriet Tubman," who has the calm and collected manner of a saint under the most intense pressure.

It is also darkly funny, from that hate group taking an innocent Christmas theme and running with it to how many times and ways Lockjaw seems to exit from the story, and, at times, simply behaving as a comedy of errors. After all, Bob, played with utter conviction and a wise comedic timing by DiCaprio, hasn't been in the covert operations game of his radical past in more than a decade, so he more or less bumbles his way through his storyline. There's a running joke of him trying to talk in code, but after 16 years of trying to forget his past and smoking plenty of weed, he simply cannot.

Somehow, Bob isn't merely a joke, either, just as the entirety of the film turns out to be much more than a precisely constructed and technically proficient comedic thriller. Yes, there's its frightening prescience, to be sure, as well as the film's pointed ideas about everyone being in over their heads against systems, powers, and ideologies that they can barely comprehend, let alone even attempt to control. One Battle After Another seems hopeless at times, especially since some scenes look as if they could be on the nightly news, but the relationship between Bob and Willa isn't only surprisingly and deeply moving by the end. It's also a wish that each generation might be better than last one.

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