Film of the Week: One Battle After Another - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

Paul Thomas Anderson has long explored characters driven and damaged by their own desires. From the porn world of Boogie Nights, to the postwar con games of The Master and the tightly wound romance of Phantom Thread, his films often unfold in closed-off worlds from the past, with the present only faintly visible. He’s sometimes seemed wary of the modern world, as if its speed might break the precision of his craft. That’s what makes One Battle After Another so striking: it’s his first film to tackle the present directly, and instead of retreating or romanticising, it dives right in.

What stands out is that Anderson doesn’t use the usual detached, ironic tone of dystopian stories. He stays close to his characters, weaving politics into their behaviour until the allegory becomes grounded and personal. The America he imagines is a police state, where the military and police have merged, immigrants are locked in camps, and Christian nationalist power brokers plot the future in secret. Anderson films this not as cartoon villainy, but as cold, ordinary bureaucracy, making it far more chilling. The secret gatherings of white-nationalist one-percenters are especially disturbing. They don’t feel exaggerated - they feel plausible, like the country’s existing power structures simply tilting a few degrees further.

Into this world come the French 75, a ragged group of revolutionaries whose dramatic style sometimes outshines their results. Their leader, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), turns rebellion into performance, while her partner Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) at first seems like her perfect counterpart: idealistic, sharp, and efficient, enraptured by her and their shared cause. Anderson shows them freeing detainees, blowing up trucks, and posing for underground magazines, their bursts of action bleeding into infatuation with each other.

Watching from the opposite pole is Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a rigid career soldier who embodies repression. His body looks carved from tension: jaw locked, shoulders braced, gaze like a fixed rifle sight. Penn makes him terrifying by how little he allows himself to move, like a man who’s spent decades strangling every impulse until only control remains. When he finally breaks that control, it’s shocking, but even more unsettling is how methodically he channels it into obsession with Perfidia. Perfidia meanwhile, is an unpredictable and uncontrollable force, which is her power and her liability - and potentially the group’s downfall.

Sixteen years later, the revolution is gone. Bob is a worn-out father trying to raise his teen daughter Willa, while Lockjaw has ascended into a clandestine fraternity of white-nationalist plutocrats, determined to shape America to their idea of purity. Anderson captures their world in sumptuous, secret wood-panelled chambers, where power hoards itself in whispers and handshakes. These scenes are some of the film’s most unnerving, because they don’t look invented - they look like meetings that could be happening right now, just out of sight.

Anderson’s style is lean and kinetic. The film never stays still, constantly moving from dusty borderlands to urban back alleys to rural nunneries, and finally into hushed, sinister interiors where the country’s fate is being drawn up like a contract. Working with cinematographer Michael Bauman, Anderson gives the film a grainy ’70s look and keeps the camera in constant motion, capturing Bob’s paranoia, anxiety and weaving escape. Jonny Greenwood’s score jumps from sharp, nervous notes to uneasy orchestral waves, more alarm than accompaniment, keeping the pulse and adrenaline high while still capturing the mischief and sometimes ludicrous elements of bathrobe-clad Bob’s frantic, stumbling efforts. The effect is disorienting and propulsive at once.

The performances hold all this together. DiCaprio gives one of his loosest and most fragile turns, showing Bob’s slide from clarity into stoned chaos without losing the ember of love still driving him. Desperate, determined but aware of his own loser status, Bob is flailing in his actions but never in his motivation. Penn gives Lockjaw a masterful rigidity, a man so armoured against perceived weakness that desire eats him alive from within. He adds in layers of comic brilliance, like his wiggling walk and stuttering explosiveness at the faintest challenge to his masculinity – a caricature that’s sadly recognisable. Taylor is compelling as Perfidia, her charisma sharp enough to cut, her sense of sexual empowerment hiding a fear of being contained in any way.

What’s striking is how alive the whole thing feels. One Battle After Another is inescapably a portrait of the world we live in, showing a future riddled with the chaos, division and violence we’re terrifying barrelling towards. Its political messages about power, violence, white supremacy and division are evident and disturbing in how possible it all feels. But it’s also wildly entertaining - restless, thrilling, funny, and full of jolts. Anderson never lets the ideas smother the thrill: chases spiral into chaos, shootouts crackle with slapstick timing, and frantic escapes hold unexpected moments of connection and camaraderie among people fighting against authoritarian forces. It’s a film that barrels forward on sheer energy, even as it sneaks in its bigger questions, and that’s what makes it land. After years of gazing backward, Anderson has made something urgent and electric, a movie that crackles with life while quietly insisting on what’s worth saving.

• In cinemas September 26. Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Cinematography by Michael Bauman.
  Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Chase Infiniti, Benicio del Toro, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall. 161 mins