Sometimes a story is so suspiciously ahead of its time one can't help but ponder the sybil gift of its writer. Paddy Chayefsky's Network (1976) script is so ominously accurate about the future of television that I had to pause the film to check that it wasn't written decades later, for example; similarly, Anaïs Mitchell's Hadestown (2006) features a fascistic god of the underworld whose intonement to "build the wall" knocked me off my feet when I first saw the play on Broadway years into the Trump administration. 

One Battle After Another, the latest film from auteur director Paul Thomas Anderson, fits this category. Its depictions of brutal anti-immigrant raids, hyper-militarized police forces, and shady ethnonationalist groups feel ripped straight from 2025 headlines. But the script was in fact written years prior, inspired by Thomas Pynchon's postmodern 1990 novel Vineland and Reagan's America in the 1980s. History certainly repeats itself, but PTA's script is uniquely prescient and therefore effective for holding a mirror to current events. This is the film's best trait, however — well-made action-comedy only goes so far, and the actual father-daughter emotional core of One Battle After Another never really strikes a chord.

The movie opens on the machinations of a far-left militant group in the southwestern US called The French 75. Aroused by their destruction of detention centers and financial institutions, two of its leaders fall in love: "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio, doing his best Big Lebowski impersonation) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, barbed-wire sharp in her biggest film role yet). They have a baby but Perfidia is not one to be tied down by domestic motherhood — especially as she's increasingly coerced into an affair with commanding officer Lockjaw (Sean Penn, terrifying as a deeply racist man haunted by lust for a Black woman). She gets Pat and their daughter into witness protection and then abandons them, while Lockjaw executes all the remaining members of The French 75.

Fast-forward 15 years and Pat is raising their daughter alone in California. The pair, under false names Bob and Willa, lead a fairly normal life in their anonymity; Bob is a stoner single father, while Willa (Chase Infiniti, charming and authentic in her newcomer status) is a normal high school girl. But Lockjaw believes Willa is his daughter and lives in fear of her discovery by the Christmas Adventurers, a well-connected white supremacist group to which he is seeking membership. A mixed-race child would no doubt be disqualifying, so Lockjaw begins trailing Bob and Willa under the guise of militarized immigration raids, drug busts, and domestic counterterrorism. To escape, Bob and Willa must work together with community members such as surviving French 75 ally Deandra (Regina Hall) and karate teacher Sergio (Benicio del Toro) — testing their relationship and learning a lot about themselves in the process.

At every turn, the threats to Bob and Willa, while played for characteristic PTA goofiness, are truly scary on two levels. First, the baddies' performances are the best in the film. Sean Penn is One Battle After Another's standout star, with real capability for obsessive violence underpinning Lockjaw's pathetically tragic antagonist. In a scene where he tests for Willa's paternity, for instance, his bulging muscles, tight t-shirt, and painfully taut face represent an internal conflict we can only begin to imagine. Other villains have their own dualities. James Raterman, who plays Lockjaw's second-in-command, draws on more than two decades of real-world experience as a Homeland Security Senior Special Agent to bring a calm menace to interrogations of high school kids. Tony Goldwyn and John Hoogenakker play white-supremacists Virgil Throckmorton and Tim Smith as calm everymen, representing the normies face of racism. Even Eric Schweig, as a Native American bounty hunter, is worryingly mute as he threatens Willa yet seems surprisingly protective.

Moreover, though, the threats against Bob and Willa are scary because they remind us of our own increasingly fraught world. On screen, the radical left and the far right are portrayed as two violent sides of the same coin, interested in destabilizing and undermining social structures. In reality, too, both groups are equally comfortable censoring political opponents and using cruel tactics to prove their point. In the movie, police are no better, as they cover up missions and plant false flag attacks to justify aggressive suppression of peaceful protests. And in reality, as masked government agents are working against my next-door neighbors, it resonated powerfully to filmically watch the same villainous activities that drive racial and xenophobic hatred. 

It's disappointing, then, that with such powerful and relevant representations of evil, the good of the film is so shallow. PTA seems to eschew every opportunity for real humanity — moments where we could have learned more about the immigrant stories of the people ushered through California's underground railroad, or about the progressive nun community and their values, or even about the central relationship between Bob and Willa as she grew up without her mom, are all cut short even in the 162-minute runtime, and prevent the film from having the emotional heft it needed to make a mark. The complexity and nuance reserved for Lockjaw and his ilk is in short supply for Bob, Willa, and their allies, so we're never really incensed to root for their success and survival beyond base instinct. I guess it's hard to fairly characterize a group when they're mostly gunned down in the first act. (Only Benicio del Toro's Sergio, with his martial-artist reverence and revolutionary calm under pressure, is sympathetic and memorable — a testament to the actor's talent after his similarly quirky and multifaceted role in this year's The Phoenician Scheme.) PTA's filmography is host to plenty of iconic villains and antiheroes, and its dearth of similarly interesting "good guys" is not filled by this latest installment, making it a slightly hollow finished product. 

Luckily, the director's skill behind the camera is immense regardless, and One Battle After Another is shot beautifully in 35mm VistaVision (continuing the format's revival in 2024's The Brutalist). Scenes of fireworks at a revolutionary uprising or of hilly car chases are amazing, especially paired with a swelling score from Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood and two lovely songs from Jon Brion, whose PTA collaboration in Punch-Drunk Love (2002) marked some of the film's best moments. 

Paul Thomas Anderson meets the sociopolitical moment with One Battle After Another, creating a terrifyingly accurate anticipation of life under a second Trump administration. But despite nailing the messages, malice, and dash of silliness of white supremacy and military fascism, the film's more forgettable father-daughter relationship doesn't foment the emotional drive needed for a deeper experience.