Film Review: One Battle After Another
In the opening scene of One Battle After Another, members of a revolutionary group break into a Californian detention center, rescuing immigrants held in cages while subduing, restraining and humiliating their captors. It’s a clear statement of intent from the movie, establishing a clear political position while also being wildly entertaining. This sequence is thrillingly edited, and feels like a major victory for a group of characters we haven’t formally met yet.
Then, right in the middle of it, there’s a tense, funny confrontation between one of the revolutionaries, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who is, to put it mildly, a pervert freak. Personal and political motivations, the movie reminds us, are intertwined; hereafter, the movie shows how awful men will bend their brains into horrible shapes and diagnose potential virtue as an illness if it means that even worse men might pat them on the back.
Paul Thomas Anderson, perhaps the best director currently working in Hollywood, knows how to make his material incredibly fun without diminishing it. His best films (Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread) blend humour and drama expertly, and One Battle After Another is no exception. But after five period pieces in a row, this one is set in the modern day (following a 16-year time jump half an hour in), and with that comes a reckoning with the state of his country: the injustice and horror, but also that weird sense that specific powerful men are causing so much damage, driven by ego and desire more than any sense of duty.
As the title One Battle After Another suggests, the resistance never fades and the battles never end; you can “retire” from a revolution but you can never stop looking over your shoulder. This is Anderson’s more overtly political film: modern American inequality, racism, and sexism are deeply ingrained into the story it’s telling, and revolutionary action is depicted as imperfect but ultimately necessary.
At the center of the film are three characters who are all feeling the pressure of these ongoing battles in very different ways: Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a former revolutionary turned paranoid, drug-addled shut-in, his frustrated teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti), and Penn’s aforementioned Col. Lockjaw, who has his sights set on them for plot reasons too fun to spoil. The film turns into an extended series of chase and escape sequences – who is chasing who changes throughout, but someone’s always just behind someone else.
One Battle After Another is loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s wonderful 1990 novel Vineland, but transposes its 60s-set story of hippies in peril to modern-day revolutionaries and the current climate of ICE raids and extraordinary authoritarian overreach in the US. The film’s craft is impeccable, as you might expect if you’ve seen the director’s other work – it’s brilliantly shot, remarkably tense, and presents a car chase sequence near the end that looks unlike any other car chase I’ve ever seen.
But what really elevates the film are its performances, which are phenomenal across the board. Leonardo DiCaprio is one of the most reliable actors in Hollywood, but it’s not an exaggeration to say that he’s never been better than he is here, imbuing his twitchy burnout Bob with 20 years of pent-up pain and paranoia.
Sean Penn’s Lockjaw feels like a wholly original monster, with tics and quirks that feel studied rather than showy, and Benicio del Toro – who plays Sergio, an ally, activist and revolutionary on his own path – is a warm and powerful presence, the closest thing the film has to a true, unambiguous hero. Newcomer Chase Infiniti, who plays Willa, is a natural too: the 25-year-old knows exactly when to play her teenage character as wise beyond her years, and when to play her as a kid in over her head.
There’s a lot I’m leaving out here – and I haven’t even touched on Johnny Greenwood’s instant-classic soundtrack – because One Battle After Another isn’t a film you can see and then immediately neatly summarise. It’s an exercise in tonal balance – it’s dramatic, tense, and so, so funny – and simply operating at a higher level of craft than the vast majority of blockbuster movies. It’s the best film of 2025.
One Battle After Another is in cinemas now.
James O’Connor has been writing about pop culture and games since 2008. He is the author of Untitled Goose Game for Boss Fight Books.
