One Battle After Another Review: A Nerve-Racking Masterpiece

"The wig that a revolutionary pulls low over her skull when she suspects a man in the grocery store is a mercenary looking for her; when she flees through a back door and is shot in the side of the head, it pops off like a toy snake from a canister. The blanket, wrapped tightly around a baby, and its flourishes of red embroidery looking eerily like speckles of blood."

"Over the past decade or so, there's been a lot written about how our major commercial auteurs, many of them white men around Paul Thomas Anderson's age, have avoided making movies set in the present day. Instead, they retreat into a past without phones or the internet and whose politics have yet to be bludgeoned into hyperlegibility. Depending on how you look at it, that argument is now underlined by-or ends with- One Battle After Another, Anderson's monumental tenth film."

The film follows an ex-revolutionary, Bob Ferguson, living under an assumed name outside a Northern California town and caring for his teenage daughter, Willa, after a militant network called the French 75 scattered sixteen years earlier. Bob is often drunk or high while protecting Willa as old threats resurface and violent, covert forces close in. The present-day setting emphasizes unmarked cars, white zip ties, and witness-protection paranoia alongside homemade transponders and lethal bombs. Absurdist comedy inflects bleak images — a wig popping off like a toy snake, embroidered flourishes resembling blood — to underscore persistent surveillance, biological determinism, and the costs of political exile.

Read at Pitchfork