One Battle After Another opens with a raid on an immigration detention camp, and the choice to begin there is neither symbolic nor subtle. The film does not ease the viewer into its moral terrain. You imagine families separated without explanation or hesitation. People processed, cataloged, and moved. From its opening minutes, the film establishes that legality and justice are not synonymous and that violence often hides behind procedure rather than spectacle.

The film is directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, and his authorship matters in how restraint is deployed. The story resists clean moral arcs or reassuring conclusions. Scenes are allowed to linger long enough for discomfort to settle rather than resolve. The film trusts the audience to recognize patterns without being guided by explicit commentary. Meaning accumulates through consequence rather than explanation.

At the center of the narrative is Bob Ferguson, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, a former 1970s revolutionary now living off the grid and hiding from the federal government in an assumed name. Bob is paranoid, isolated, and frequently intoxicated. He is not portrayed as a misunderstood idealist or a relic of moral clarity. Instead, he is a man who survived his convictions without learning how to live with what they cost. The film refuses to redeem him through nostalgia or irony.

Bob’s fragile equilibrium collapses when his daughter, Willa, becomes a target. Willa is not written as a symbol or a passive object of rescue. She is observant, capable, and acutely aware of the danger surrounding her. She understands that her father’s past is not finished with them. Her presence forces Bob to confront the fact that political choices echo forward into lives that never consented to them.

The antagonist, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, Sean Penn, embodies the film’s critique of authoritarian power. Lockjaw is not volatile or theatrical in his cruelty. He is disciplined, methodical, and deeply comfortable within systems of enforcement. His racism is not impulsive but bureaucratic. The film presents him as someone who understands power as something exercised quietly through institutions rather than shouted from the margins.

Sixteen years before the events of the film, Bob lived under another name. Then known as Pat Calhoun, he was part of a militant group called French 75. The group engaged in bank robberies and detainee liberations, framing their violence as revolutionary necessity. The film neither celebrates nor dismisses these acts outright. Instead, it interrogates what happens when urgency fades and consequences remain.

The name French 75 itself carries layered symbolism. It likely references the French Resistance during World War II, borrowing the moral authority of anti fascist struggle. Most members of French 75 do not survive. Those who do are hunted, imprisoned, or forced into hiding. Very few escape unmarked by violence or betrayal. The film does not linger on their deaths, allowing a montage and absence to serve as evidence. Survival becomes less a victory than a prolonged reckoning with unresolved harm.

Perfidia Beverly Hills occupies a haunting place in that earlier history. She was Bob’s lover (and others) and a central figure in French 75. Her commitment burned intensely and without compromise. When she disappears from the narrative, the film offers no explanation or closure. That silence becomes one of the film’s most unsettling elements.

Perfidia’s disappearance invites uncomfortable reflection. Do some people burn bright and then turn away when belief or passion no longer protects them. Do they leave out of fear, exhaustion, or recognition that they themselves have become corrosive.The film refuses to answer, and that refusal feels deliberate.

Running alongside Bob’s personal reckoning is a sustained depiction of community collaboration under pressure. Immigrant movement is shown as an underground railroad built on community trust, timing, and silence. Safe houses appear briefly and without exposition. People act not because they expect reward or recognition. They seem to act because doing nothing for others feels like complicity.

One of the film’s most revealing sequences centers on Lockjaw’s raid at a chicken processing plant. The Christmas Adventurers Club, Lockjaw’s preferred white supremacist organization, reacts with outrage, not at the suffering inflicted, but at the disruption of profit. They despise Latino workers while depending on their labor. The contradiction is not incidental. It is foundational to how power and exploitation operate together.

Lockjaw’s integration of white supremacist ideology into law enforcement culture is depicted as procedural rather than conspiratorial. Shared assumptions circulate quietly. Discretion becomes enforcement. Silence becomes policy. Extremism thrives not through chaos, but through routine. Violence becomes normalized through paperwork and hierarchy.

The Christmas Adventurers Club stands as the film’s sharpest satirical invention. It represents extreme right wing philosophy disguised in nostalgia, ritual, and sentimentality. By pairing childhood imagery with racial violence, the film exposes how hate often hides behind tradition. The absurdity of the name contrasts with the seriousness of its power. Nostalgia becomes camouflage for brutality and assasination. The Club is portrayed as a high level white power organization composed of influential and insulated figures. Members greet one another with “hail Saint Nick” without irony or self awareness. Ritual normalizes extremism within elite spaces. This is not fringe chaos or disorder. It is disciplined, connected, and lethal.

Lockjaw’s desire to join the Christmas Adventurers Club motivates his most extreme actions. When he is invited to become a member, his past interracial relationship with Perfidia becomes a liability. Willa’s existence threatens the purity narrative the Club demands. Lockjaw seeks to kill her not only out of fear, but to erase evidence that would disqualify him. Violence becomes a credential rather than an impulse.

What makes this moment especially chilling is how bureaucratic the violence becomes. Murder is framed as housekeeping rather than rage. The film exposes how white supremacist movements rely on constant erasure of inconvenient truths within their own ranks. Intimacy becomes dangerous when ideology demands consistency. Family becomes evidence rather than bond.

The Club’s eventual rejection of Lockjaw completes the film’s critique. Once his past is revealed, his loyalty and enforcement no longer matter. He becomes disposable despite his service. The organization turns on him with the same efficiency it uses against its enemies. White supremacy promised belonging but survived through endless purging.

Religion appears briefly but deliberately throughout the film. The biblical warning that those who live by the sword will die by the sword functions as historical observation rather than sermon. Violence multiplies consequences rather than resolving them. French 75 learned this too late. Lockjaw never learns it at all.

The film accelerates toward its conclusion through car chases and emotionally charged confrontations. Motion never substitutes for resolution. Escape is temporary and safety is conditional. Every action leaves residue behind. The film insists that residue be acknowledged rather than erased.

Adapted from a novel deeply skeptical of nostalgia and ideological purity, the story preserves that unease rather than smoothing it away. The past is unstable terrain rather than moral anchor. Memory distorts responsibility. Mythology replaces reckoning. The film treats history as something that presses forward, not something safely concluded.

The film’s awards recognition underscores how rare this kind of powerful storytelling has become. At 13, it received an unusually high number of major nominations for what feels like an indy film, including recognition for directing, acting, writing, and technical craft. These nominations reflect not just ambition, but discipline. Nothing in the film feels accidental. Every choice reinforces its moral tension.

The technical achievements deserve particular attention. The cinematography, editing, sound, production design, and score work together without drawing attention away from the story. Craft becomes argument rather than ornament. The film’s structure supports its themes rather than overwhelming them. Restraint becomes a form of clarity.

Though, shot over a compressed schedule and backed by a major studio, the film was widely viewed as ambitious and risky due to the plot. That risk is visible on screen. The film does not seek consensus or comfort. Even its recognition reveals contradictions, including notable actor omissions alongside major praise. Awards, like movements, reflect power as much as merit.

The awards ceremony itself will likely frame the film as prestige cinema. That framing risks missing the point of the work. One Battle After Another is not interested in prestige. It is interested in consequence. It asks what remains after movements and people collapse and certainty dissolves.

The film does not argue that resistance is futile or that belief is naive. It argues something harder and more enduring. Conviction without accountability corrodes from within. Solidarity requires endurance long after slogans fade. And some people, rather than becoming heroes or villains, simply disappear, leaving others to reckon with the silence they leave behind.

Taken as a whole, One Battle After Another is a film that refuses comfort and resists simplification. Its ambition is matched by discipline, and its political clarity never collapses into slogans. The performances are committed without drifting into self importance, and the filmmaking trusts the audience to sit with unresolved tension rather than demand resolution. The satire cuts sharply because it is grounded in recognizable structures of power rather than abstraction. For its moral seriousness, narrative risk, and willingness to confront the cost of belief without nostalgia, I rate the film 4.5 out of 5 stars. You might watch it twice.

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Julian Vasquez Heilig is a scholar, former provost and dean, and public commentator whose work focuses on equity, leadership, and social justice. He approaches film as a serious cultural and political text rather than as entertainment alone. A lifelong cinephile, he credits Professor Margarita De la Vega-Hurtado from the University of Michigan’s American Culture Program, whose film course in the 1990s taught him as an undergraduate to read cinema as social critique, historical argument, and moral inquiry. That training shapes how he watches films like One Battle After Another, with attention to power, ideology, and consequence rather than spectacle. Those who know him understand he believes injustice should be confronted directly rather than explained away.