One Battle After Another (2025)

The revolution has a password. Dad has forgotten it.

Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson · Approximately 162 minutes
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio · Chase Infiniti · Sean Penn · Benicio del Toro · Teyana Taylor · Regina Hall

Source-based first draft. Verdict and advisories are proposed; numerical Corny DNA remains unscored. Explore the 2025 collection.

Bob Ferguson has a history of revolutionary activity and a present that makes retrieving a useful piece of information look like a considerable achievement. When danger returns, his fear for his daughter has to travel through the person he has actually become. That gap gives One Battle After Another much of its comedy and a surprising amount of its tenderness.

The official synopsis establishes the former radical, his teenage daughter Willa and an enemy's return after sixteen years. Paul Thomas Anderson builds a pursuit around that family while allowing institutions, communities and personal delusions to keep colliding around it. The scale is large; the immediate need is understandable. A father has to find his child, and she needs more than his account of the past.

Before you watch

Bloody violence, raids, abduction and sustained danger involving a teenager. Sexual coercion and strong verbal references to rape are present, alongside racist language and white-supremacist ideology. Cannabis misuse is significant to the central character. The BBFC also flags flashing images. A specific coercive test and its family implications remain behind the advisory disclosure.

Specific content details (contains spoilers)

Lockjaw subjects the captive Willa to a paternity test while threatening her safety.

A capable film about an incapable man

DiCaprio's Bob gives the action a productive impediment. His fear is sincere, but sincerity does not restore the habits, memory or coordination that a crisis requires. Anderson can find comedy in an attempt to function without making the danger imaginary.

The distinction matters. If the film merely mocked a ridiculous former activist, the daughter would become an excuse to move him between humiliations. Instead, his desire to reach Willa remains a source of urgency. His limitations can be funny because the story keeps taking the people endangered by them seriously.

Chase Infiniti helps maintain that balance. Willa has her own information, competencies and response to the life arranged around her. Her perspective makes it possible to question Bob's protective behaviour while still caring whether they find each other. She is more than an innocent object whose disappearance activates an adult man's importance.

The other men have more dangerous fantasies

Sean Penn makes Lockjaw's authority into a disturbing physical performance. He carries institutional force and private insecurity together. The character's grotesqueness is useful because his power does not depend on becoming personally impressive. A man can look absurd and remain able to ruin somebody else's life.

That is an effective foundation for the political comedy. Personal obsession can recruit official machinery, then describe its own actions in the language of public purpose. The film makes that relation frightening without requiring every representative of power to possess a coherent grand plan.

Benicio del Toro's Sergio supplies a valuable contrast through practical attention. His competence has a social basis: people know one another, assistance has routes and resources, and survival depends on work already being done. The performance brings ease without making the situation seem easy.

The contrast gives the film a more substantial view of solidarity than the heroic memory Bob sometimes reaches for. Help exists through people maintaining relationships in the present. It has to be organised, repeated and adapted under pressure.

The action knows what it cannot see

Anderson's staging makes movement and withheld information work together. Escape is a problem of routes, access, timing and who understands the area. That allows the surrounding world to remain active instead of becoming a neutral background for a chase.

The late road pursuit is especially effective because the road itself controls visibility. A crest can conceal the distance between vehicles and the intention of the person ahead. The viewer has to anticipate through the same incomplete information as the characters. The suspense grows from a simple physical condition, held long enough to become intolerable.

The film also has the confidence to let anxiety coexist with awkwardness. A body running, climbing or trying to remember something need not look heroic for the movement to matter. Jonny Greenwood's credited score belongs to that unsettled momentum; the official craft credits identify the collaboration.

The freedom to caricature has a cost

The broadness is not equally generous to everyone. Teyana Taylor gives Perfidia a forceful presence, but her political and sexual volatility risks becoming a mythology that other characters inherit more fully than a life the film continues to explore. The shift away from her is dramatically consequential and also a limitation worth keeping in view.

The sexual material particularly needs its power relationships acknowledged. A demand backed by arrest or release is coercive, however provocative a character may have been in another encounter. The film's dark humour should not be used to describe that leverage as an ordinary affair.

At 162 minutes, the accumulation can also become expansive enough to test patience. Some grotesque institutional business announces its target more emphatically than necessary. The emotional line and the action's spatial control largely sustain the length, though they do not make every detour equally valuable.

Corny DNA

There is deliberate absurdity, paranoid excess and some extravagant masculine posing. The comedy comes from chosen contrasts and timing. Its visual control and family concern provide stronger reasons to watch than an ironic appetite for a film going wrong. All six numerical axes remain unscored.

Verdict

Worth watching — proposed. Strong action staging, a persuasive father–daughter relationship and an unusually productive blend of panic and comedy support the recommendation. The caveats are length, occasionally emphatic caricature, the handling of Perfidia's perspective and substantial coercive and racist material. The film's energy is most persuasive when private affection has to become useful action.

Spoilers from here

Reveal the ending and detailed analysis

A daughter gets to answer back

The test confirms that Lockjaw is Willa's biological father. Willa defeats her pursuer on the road and reunites with Bob. Lockjaw later dies at the hands of the racist club he wanted to join. Bob shares Perfidia's letter, and Willa eventually leaves for a protest with his support. The scene account corroborates these outcomes.

Paternity does not settle the film's idea of fatherhood. Bob's failures remain, but his relationship with Willa has been made through years of imperfect care. Lockjaw treats biological connection as a risk to his ambition. The contrast becomes especially ugly when he turns a captive girl's body into evidence he can use.

Willa's final independence matters because reunion could otherwise reward Bob with restored control. The ending allows his concern to continue without making her future an extension of his past. The revolutionary inheritance remains available for revision.

The countersign also changes meaning. As an organisational password it can be forgotten, weaponised or learned mechanically. Recognition between Bob and Willa has to involve something more particular. The film earns its tenderness when those people reach one another through the language that was supposed to keep them safe.

Sources

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