Some films hit you like a brick on first viewing, and One Battle After Another is one of them. It’s unruly, overstuffed, and constantly accelerating, as though the movie itself is inhaling the same frantic air as the country it depicts. But when you return to it, the film settles into clarity. All that volatility—the tonal lurches, the narrative whiplash, the quick cuts between violence and absurdity—begins to reveal its architecture. Anderson isn’t creating chaos for effect; he’s building a portrait of a nation where chaos has become the dominant language.
Writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson thrusts us into the radical French 75’s revolution without ideological handrails. “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) storm the Otay Mesa Detention Center with the kind of radical fervor that feels half rage, half theatricality. The sexualized humiliation Perfidia inflicts on the facility’s commanding officer, Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), becomes one of the film’s central pivot points—not because it’s exploitative, but because it awakens in Lockjaw a toxic mix of desire, vengeance, and wounded pride that will shape the next two decades of the story.
The French 75’s bombings—politicians’ offices, banks, an entire power grid—are filmed with Anderson’s unnerving detachment. They aren’t glorified. They aren’t condemned. They simply exist in the world of the film the way storms exist in nature: violent, destabilizing, inevitable in retrospect. Ant they ignite a sort of dormant memory of past attempts at aggressive domestic revolutions within the U.S. At one point in the first thirty minutes, my historians’s heart burst when the Haymarket Riot of 1894 gets a quick fleeting mention.
The fatal turn arrives when Perfidia, caught planting preparing for the next attack, bargains for her freedom with Lockjaw in a motel. Her betrayal of the French 75 that follows—trading information for immunity—splinters the group irrevocably.
And this is why Pat must flee.
When Perfidia gives birth to Charlene, their daughter, she chooses to continue her violent struggle rather than build a life. After she’s captured during a robbery gone wrong, Lockjaw forces her to give up the French 75. Those who aren’t killed scatter. Pat grabs the baby and runs, taking on the alias “Bob Ferguson,” renaming Charlene as “Willa,” and disappearing into the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross.
The revolution devours its own, and Bob and Willa are the collateral damage it spits out.
Sixteen years later, One Battle After Another shifts into something quieter and more mysterious—a father-daughter character study camouflaged within a political thriller. DiCaprio plays Bob with a beautifully battered humor. His deadpan is so dry it verges on existential. His former life as “Rocketman,” the explosives expert of the French 75, has curdled into paranoia and marijuana haze. He lounges around on the couch, watching old westerns in a plaid bathrobe – already an iconic image of modern American cinema.
Willa (Chase Infiniti), now a teenager, is the film’s emotional compass. Infiniti brings a rawness that feels lived-in rather than acted—frustrated with her father, hungry for autonomy, and terrified of becoming anything like either of her parents. The chemistry between DiCaprio and Infiniti becomes the movie’s most steadying force. Anderson shoots their scenes with empathy and restraint, letting silence do the heavy lifting.
For all its violence and grief, the film also indulges in a sly linguistic comedy built around the French 75’s codespeak—a system that once functioned as pragmatic security but has ossified into ritual. Anderson mines this for both tension and absurdity, especially in Bob’s frantic hotline exchanges with the unseen “Comrade Josh,” whose entire personality seems constructed from smugness and adherence to procedure. Bob, genuinely in danger, works his way through multiple verification layers only to fail the final question—“What time is it?”—a passphrase turned litmus test for revolutionary virtue. Josh’s refusal to help isn’t just bureaucracy gone mad; it’s Anderson’s pointed critique of movements that let ritual replace purpose, where performing fluency in the language of revolution becomes more important than protecting its people. The scene is hilarious because it’s infuriating: a life-or-death emergency trapped inside an ideological call center. And because DiCaprio has become the master of exasperated deadpan delivery.
Sean Penn’s Lockjaw is one of Anderson’s most chilling villains because he isn’t a caricature—he’s a recognizable American type. His wounded male pride congeals into cruelty. His rise through national security agencies is treated as a bureaucratic inevitability. And his recruitment into the Christmas Adventurers Club—a wealthy, white-supremacist Christian society who greet one another with “Hail Saint Nick” and wish “Merry Christmas” in the California summer—cements him as part of a larger machine of soft-spoken fanaticism.
Their politeness makes them terrifying.
Anderson stages one of the year’s most satisfying moments when one of the Adventurers’ henchmen, Tim Smith—an unassuming, bland, sweater-clad suburban extremist—gets abruptly dispatched to avoid humiliation, where he ultimately meets his end. It’s extremely jarring, yet a punchline and a political point all at once.
What distinguishes One Battle After Another is not its set pieces, though many are extraordinary—the school-dance raid, Sergio St. Carlos (an electric Benicio Del Toro) ferrying immigrants through hidden tunnels, the rooftop chase, the desert highway showdown. It is Anderson’s ability to transform them into symbols of national volatility.
Police infiltrating protests to trigger violence. Militias operating like private religious clubs. A sanctuary city functioning as both refuge and battleground. Anderson’s America is a place where institutions rot from the inside and communities salvage one another out of necessity rather than ideology.
It is vintage and deeply modern, with a comedic throughline in which Bob is desperately trying to charge his cell-phone (a flip phone) while he trails Sergio through his cascade of apartments. That the film can follow these threads while still finding moments of humor—often through DiCaprio’s bone-dry delivery—feels miraculous. Anderson has mastered a kind of absurdist tonal register here, one where comedy and terror share a single breath.
The final sequence—Willa’s escape from the militia, the desert-road confrontation with Tim Smith, Bob racing to reach her—becomes a metaphor for the entire film: a chaotic, terrifying, darkly funny struggle to survive the consequences of other people’s ideologies.
When Willa demands the countersign from Bob after the crash, her gun shaking, her worldview collapsing, the film reaches its emotional summit. Their reconciliation isn’t tidy. It’s tremulous, wounded, and painfully human.
The final grace note—the letter from Perfidia, Bob’s blessing as Willa leaves for a protest in Oakland—doesn’t suggest healing. It suggests movement. It suggests the possibility that the next generation might steer the ship differently.
One Battle After Another is messy, unevenly paced, sometimes overwhelming. But its flaws are inseparable from its ambitions. Anderson has crafted a film that refuses tidy arcs or coherent ideologies because its subject—America as it is lived, remembered, and mythologized—is incoherent.
It is a furious, funny, brutal, tender, and genuinely visionary work.
A flawed masterpiece of contradictions.
One of the defining American films of this century.
★★★★1/2
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