The film One Battle After Another opens abruptly with a spectacular action sequence carried out by a group of activists calling themselves French 75, who free migrants from a detention center. Before you can even catch your breath, you’re hit head-on by their messianic mission: a tirade of liberal slogans and demands (free borders, free bodies, free choices, free from fear) delivered without pause and without nuance, like a manifesto that no longer has time for people.
The main heroine becomes pregnant, but this “biological detail” does not stop her from continuing her revolutionary struggle. The caregiving role is outsourced to her partner, the resident explosives expert, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and the film seems to invert “traditional” roles on purpose just to tick another box. While he finds a kind of peace in the new needs that come with caring for the child, she progressively radicalizes, shifting the fight from the ideological register into that of heinous crime.
The woman ends up taking on all the traits of a guerrilla leader ready to do anything, and she dies quickly and badly, thus demonstrating — with rudimentary pedagogy — that violence is conditioned neither by color nor by sex. The problem is not that the film shows a violent woman, but the schematic way in which it sacrifices her: she betrays her group faster than we can decode all the messages shovelled in our direction. Some moments of tension and a few action scenes do work at the level of pure cinema, despite the didacticism that surrounds them.
The American state, abusive and paranoid, is represented by the character played by Sean Penn: permanently sexually aroused, with his finger on the trigger, controlled from the shadows by some vague and threatening secret “clubs.” The Christmas Adventurers Club appears as a transparent acronym for the KKK, an organization of the “superior ones,” which you cannot join if you are Jewish or if you like Black people. The state and white extremism are not explored but sketched in broad strokes, like icons in an ideological PowerPoint.
Only here do we actually arrive at the film’s real theme: a madman who wants to enlist in this pseudo-KKK and who, in order to be accepted, must erase any trace of his sexual ties with a Black woman. It is an old, recycled theme, already treated in literature and cinema (from American History X to Native Son), but brought here in a rushed and schematic form, with no time for a credible transformation of the character. Everything seems reduced to a textbook case of how hatred rewrites its own memory.
Leonardo DiCaprio ends up defending his little daughter from this lunatic determined to kill her, while her LGBTQ+ friends betray her without hesitation, handing her phone number over to the army. It does not read as a lucid observation about the complexity of political alliances, but as yet another pretext to introduce “representation” and then use it instrumentally, just to twist the plot screw one more time. The characters do not exist as people, but as labels placed in the service of the film’s argument.
The madman fails to “bury” his mistake and ends up executed by the Christmas Adventurers Club itself, in an act of internal justice that closes the circle of hypocrisy. The extremists punish their own monster, not out of morality, but to preserve the imaginary purity of their cause.
What is this whole film actually telling us? That ideologies are interchangeable, radicalization has no gender, and violence is always legitimized by some “higher” cause. Only that the film never truly seeks truth or human ambiguity; instead, it ticks boxes: activism, racism, patriarchy, oppressive state, minorities — all thrown into an ideological blender that produces more noise than meaning. Had it had the courage to let at least some of these conflicts breathe, it could have been an uncomfortable film in the best sense; as it is, it remains first and foremost a symptom of its times.
