One Battle After Another – Film Review

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a feral, feverish return to maximalist cinema — a politically charged action thriller wrapped in the director’s signature melancholy and humanism. Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, Anderson channels the novelist’s chaos and cultural paranoia into a propulsive, incendiary narrative about love, betrayal, and ideological decay. The result is both a bruising spectacle and an aching character study: a two-and-a-half-hour symphony of emotional exhaustion and revolutionary rage.

One Battle After Another tells the story of Ghetto Pat Calhoun, a burned-out ex-revolutionary hiding under the alias Bob Ferguson, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in one of his most layered performances in years. Years after a failed movement known as the French 75 collapses under the weight of internal betrayal and state violence, Bob is forced out of his isolation when his teenage daughter, Willa (played with fiery conviction by Chase Infiniti), becomes a target of the same military system that destroyed their lives. It’s an archetypal setup — the sins of the past revisiting the present — but in Anderson’s hands, it becomes a blistering meditation on the cycles of rebellion and repression that define America itself.

Anderson, who writes, directs, and produces, crafts his first outright action thriller, yet he refuses to abandon his fascination with messy, contradictory souls. The film’s structure echoes the anarchic sprawl of Magnolia and Inherent Vice, but the tone here is more severe — less dreamy nostalgia, more smoldering outrage. There’s an immediacy to the way Anderson shoots conflict: handheld cameras that jitter like nervous hearts, bursts of color from homemade explosives, and long, unbroken takes that drag the audience through chaos rather than glorify it. But amid the gunfire and adrenaline, there’s a deep sadness that pervades every frame, a sense that every ideology and victory is destined to curdle.

DiCaprio carries much of that emotional weight. His Bob Ferguson is a man haunted not just by the state’s brutality but by his own idealism — a revolutionary who can’t tell whether his past sacrifices meant anything. DiCaprio’s face, weary and frightened yet fiercely determined, becomes a landscape of guilt and redemption. He gives the kind of quiet, internalized performance Anderson’s world rewards: more about gesture than grandstanding, more about loss than triumph.

Opposite him, Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven Lockjaw is one of the director’s most chilling creations. Penn plays him not as a typical military villain, but as a grotesque embodiment of repression — a man whose cruelty is inseparable from his self-loathing. His obsession with Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) and later with her daughter transforms him into a portrait of the state as a wounded, violent narcissist. Penn’s performance is unnerving precisely because it’s so controlled: a smirk here, a whisper there, until the mask cracks and the full depravity shows.

Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia, the spark that ignites the entire conflict, is both the film’s moral compass and its tragic ghost. Taylor gives a stunningly raw performance — fierce, magnetic, but shaded with vulnerability. She brings texture to a role that could’ve been mythic and abstract, grounding Perfidia’s revolutionary fury in maternal love and personal trauma. Her chemistry with DiCaprio is electric, simmering with both devotion and ideological distance.

Supporting them are Benicio del Toro as Sergio St. Carlos, a stoic leader in the immigrant community who doubles as a surrogate father figure, and Regina Hall as Deandra, the French 75’s last surviving warrior. Both actors embody the endurance of resistance — not as slogans but as lived experience. Chase Infiniti, in her breakout role as Willa, is the film’s revelation: fiery, wounded, and authentic. She brings to the character a generational defiance that transcends rhetoric. In her eyes, the revolution is not history — it’s inheritance.

Anderson’s direction, as always, feels organic yet meticulously controlled. He stages massive sequences of violence — raids, bombings, chases — with the same intimacy he applies to hushed domestic scenes. The set pieces have a tactile grit rarely seen in modern Hollywood. Cinematographer Michael Bauman does dazzling work: the California sun bleeding into the smog of burning cities, the nightscapes of Baktan Cross illuminated by flickering neon and tear gas. Every image feels alive with purpose and memory, echoing both There Will Be Blood’s grandeur and Inherent Vice’s dreamy paranoia.

The score by Jonny Greenwood underscores that duality — pulsating electronic beats that morph into mournful strings, as if the machinery of violence is trying to birth a melody. It’s perhaps Greenwood’s most abrasive and emotionally charged work yet, elevating each confrontation into something mythic and deeply human.

But what makes One Battle After Another truly gripping is not just its technical prowess — it’s Anderson’s ability to infuse political rage with moral ambiguity. The French 75 are neither saints nor terrorists; they are people crushed by the contradictions of their ideals. The film never preaches or simplifies. Instead, it forces its audience to confront the uncomfortable question of whether rebellion, in a world addicted to violence, can ever be pure. Every explosion is followed by quiet — the sound of survivors counting the cost.

Still, the film isn’t flawless. Anderson’s commitment to sprawling narrative density occasionally blurs its emotional throughline. The second act, in particular, meanders between subplots that feel more literary than cinematic, and the pacing can test patience. There’s a sense that Anderson, in trying to adapt Pynchon’s moral chaos, occasionally gets lost in his own labyrinth. Yet, even when the storytelling falters, the filmmaking itself remains mesmerizing — every frame pulsing with intent.

What ultimately elevates One Battle After Another above other political thrillers is its compassion. Beneath the explosions and betrayals lies a deeply human story about family and forgiveness. Anderson isn’t interested in glorifying revolt; he’s interested in what happens after — when the war ends, the slogans fade, and the survivors are left to reckon with what they’ve become. The film’s final scenes — intimate, wordless, quietly devastating — are among the most moving Anderson has ever directed. They close not with victory, but with acceptance.

In many ways, One Battle After Another feels like the culmination of Anderson’s thematic obsessions: the search for connection amid chaos, the yearning for grace in a corrupt world. It’s part revenge saga, part family tragedy, part political lament — and somehow, it all coheres into something exhilarating. This is the rare film that’s both thrilling and mournful, intellectual and visceral, angry and tender.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a dense, electrifying odyssey of guilt, survival, and radical love — a film that wages war not only against systems of power but against the despair those systems breed. It’s sprawling, imperfect, and overwhelming, but also vital — a testament to Anderson’s belief that every act of rebellion, no matter how futile, is a kind of prayer for a better world.