‘One Battle After Another’ Is a Wild, Breathtaking Success
P.T. Anderson’s screwball thriller finds the master filmmaker firing on all cylinders.
Hippies turned pale yuppies, revolutionaries turned stoner (step)fathers, and cartoonish ICE agents chasing the dragons of their eternal, celestial dreams—Paul Thomas Anderson’s electric, macabre, mesmerizing joyride through the dense and malevolent jungle of bombed-out California, One Battle After Another, has it all. Anderson’s loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland is a whirlwind of inescapable, enigmatic filmmaking that has surpassed Ari Aster’s brilliant Eddington as the can’t-miss film of 2025.
For a creator who is among the greatest Americans ever to take on the silver screen, Anderson has outdone himself, weaving an absurdist action-thriller within a screwball comedy that seeks out the confusing and confounding nature of traditional parenthood. One Battle After Another left me laughing, crying, and clutching the armrest over three, speedily passing hours. It is a life’s work, with Anderson operating at the full complement of his otherworldly powers. And audiences agree. Not only does One Battle After Another hold a remarkable 94 percent “fresh” rating from film critics on Rotten Tomatoes; Anderson’s 10th feature film grossed nearly $50 million at box office in its first weekend, marking P.T.’s biggest box-office return ever.
The film opens in the past; the ’60s, to be exact. Ghetto Pat, Perfidia Beverly Hills, and a crew of left-wing radicals besiege an immigration detention center in Southern California. Armed with guns, smoke bombs, and liberation theology, the scruffy ensemble of freedom fighters who go by name of “the French 75” storm the gated migration center and set free hundreds of illegals. “Our message is clear,” screams Perfidia, played by the fantastic Teyana Taylor. “Free borders, free bodies, and free choices!”
As she clears the immigration center, Perfidia encounters the film’s villain, U.S. Army Colonel Steve Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn. Lockjaw, dressed in too-tight fatigues and sporting a Nazi-ish undercut, becomes sexually aroused as Perfidia holds him hostage. Lockjaw, a vehement racist, and Perfidia, a black revolutionary, are an odd pair, but neither can contain their unlikely but insatiable sexual desire for one another. With a semi-automatic weapon pointed at his chest, Lockjaw licks his lips and states his perverse appetite for his should-be enemy. In the distance, Ghetto Pat, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, triggers a series of fireworks that allows the crew of revolutionaries and hundreds of illegals to escape into the night. As Ghetto Pat and Perfidia reunite under a dazzling array of streaking lights, the two make love in a field.
And so goes the first 45 minutes of this shockingly sexual, accelerating ride through rebellion and eros. Explosions, bank robberies, and a ton of sex litter the screen. Amid the revolution, Perfidia gets pregnant with the racist Lockjaw’s child. When her child is born, Ghetto Pat, who believes he is the father, attempts to forge a homespun trad-life, but the revolution runs too deep for Perfidia. When a robbery goes wrong, only Lockjaw can save Perfidia from a life in prison. Through witness protection, she disappears into the American interior, leaving Ghetto Pat to hide the child in the pot-growing hills of the fictional town of Baktan Cross. The father-daughter pair assumes new identities and for 16 years forges the sort of backwoods, hippie lifestyle that is all too common in certain necks of the wide, lost American West.
The Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood, who has lent his musical services to There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread, two of Anderson’s most brilliant films, is back again as the composer for One Battle After Another. Seamlessly oscillating between harmony and discord, Greenwood is at his experimental best, pacing the film with the minimalist piano of Arvo Pärt and the luscious violins of Tchaikovsky. The score sweeps and swooshes with the visuals from one scene to the next. Behind the camera is Michael Bauman, the same man who shot Anderson’s Licorice Pizza in 2021. Bauman, who served as chief lighting technician on Anderson’s middle-career work, is fantastic here. Using VistaVision, a film format that prints on larger film negatives to produce a clearer image, but hasn’t been popular since the 1950s, Bauman dazzles. From the blue tint of the night immigration raid to the golden deserts whose presence steams like shimmering heat on hot pavement, every frame that Bauman has manufactured here stuns.
Enmeshed behind a cloud of weed smoke, Ghetto Pat, now Bob Ferguson, does his best to raise the warm but rebellious Willa, his now-16-year-old daughter. Willa enjoys learning karate from Sensei Sergio, played by the wonderful Benicio Del Toro, and hanging out with her cross-dressing, polyamorous friends. When her friends show up unannounced to take Willa to the high school dance, Bob admonishes his daughter for bringing anyone to their hideout in the woods before interrogating the friends. To Willa, who doesn’t know her mother and only has a shallow understanding of her father’s past, it all reads like an insecure, overprotective dad. In reality, Bob’s secret past is always lurking.
Sure enough, Lockjaw returns in search of Bob and Willa after he is questioned about his sexual proclivities during an interview for admittance into a highly selective and secretive white nationalist cult called the Christmas Adventurer’s Club. Lockjaw’s mission from that point forward is plain: to erase any known evidence of his past dalliances, including the child he fathered in heat with Perfidia Beverly Hills. Amid the chaos, Willa and Bob get separated as old members of the French 75 extract both to safety. But for Bob, who spent the past 20 years in a cloud of smoke, remembering the crucial passwords that will reunite him with his daughter at the rendezvous point proves problematic. This scenario leads to several uproarious, laugh-out-loud moments as Bob and Sensei Sergio, who merrily tags along for the adventure, attempt to find Willa.
The rest of the film plays as a run-and-gun thriller with chase scenes galore, from Sensei Sergio’s underground den of illegals (“a Latino Harriet Tubman situation”) to a nunnery whose inhabitants grow weed and shoot AR-15s in the high desert. Not only are Bob and Willa and Sensei Sergio on the run from Lockjaw, but Lockjaw is also, unknowingly, on the run from an assassin directed by the Christmas Adventurer’s Club to neutralize Lockjaw after the cult learns he once engaged in an interracial relationship.
The final third of the film involves a sequence of car chases that is so impressive you simply have to see to believe. If there is any one aspect of this film that requires it be viewed on a big screen, it is this marvelous, moving chaos of undulating roads, rolling hills, and supercharged cars speeding across the torrid desert. During a hurricane segment that must have lasted nearly 30 minutes, I could feel my hand digging into the seat cushion as if I myself was riding the great rollercoaster of my own life. Even more astonishing is how it ended—in tears. But the best kind.
Beyond the car chases and shootouts and the overcharged sexual atmosphere, Bob’s attempt to be a dad in a world besieged by political war is what One Battle After Another is truly about. A father coming to terms with his own faults while still doing the best he can to meet his daughter, on her turf, in her words, through her eyes. At its core, One Battle After Another is a remarkable surprise. Hidden beneath the layers of obtuse, exotic, experimental filmmaking is a movie that is really just about family: the love of a father for his daughter and the lengths one man is willing to go to rescue his child in need.
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Speaking with Sensei Sergio as the two men search for Willa, Bob admits that his abilities as a father can only cover so much ground: “I thought the person coming through that door one day was gonna be her mom. To see her daughter, you know? Teach her girl stuff. She’d do her hair. She’d be a mom. I can’t do her hair, man. You know that? I don’t know how to do her hair right.”
In addition to the writing, score, and filmography, One Battle After Another is a collection of tour-de-force performances. Penn is a revelation, a shoo-in for Best Supporting Actor; Del Toro is hilarious; DiCaprio won’t win the Best Actor Academy Award, but he still sparkles as the weed-scrambled pops. Chase Infiniti, who plays Willa, announces herself as one of the premier new American talents in her first feature appearance. Even Regina Hall, in her short screen time, turns in the performance of a career.
After the film finished, I asked a 60-some-year-old woman who was lingering outside the cinema in rural Virginia her opinion. “Different,” she said. But she was smiling. How could she not be? One Battle After Another is a must-see. There’s nothing like it. Something that only Anderson could conjure. In the words of Bob Ferguson, grab “a few small beers” and hit the theater. This is a film not to be missed.
