‘One Battle After Another’ is a terrifically absurdist thriller that feels like ‘No Country for Old Men’ filtered through a fever dream. It’s brutal, unpredictable, and darkly satirical – a film about chaos, ideology, and family, all colliding in the streets of contemporary America.

At its centre is an interracial couple, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor – radical freedom fighters staging violent acts of resistance: bank raids, military assaults, and urban sabotage. Early on, we meet Sean Penn as a racist colonel named Lockjaw, whose sinister fascination with Taylor’s character drives much of the story’s venom. Years later, the film’s main narrative unfolds: a mixed-race 16-year-old daughter who may or may not be the product of that earlier relationship becomes a target. Penn’s character wants her dead, fearing that her existence could expose him and derail his bid for entry into an elite white supremacist network called The Christmas Adventurers.

It’s a sprawling, cat-and-mouse thriller where the left-wing guerrillas and right-wing extremists mirror each other – each with their own bunkers, codes, and underground escape routes. The film’s tension comes from this moral symmetry: different ideologies, identical tactics. While there are clear political echoes – particularly of Alex Garland’s ‘Civil War’ – this isn’t just a political film. It’s about the way generations replay old conflicts, rewriting and whitewashing history in the process.

Sean Penn’s performance is astonishingly unsettling – part Max Cady from ‘Cape Fear’, part unhinged relic of the American war machine. DiCaprio, meanwhile, plays his character as a burnout revolutionary, lost in the fog of substances and memories, unable even to recall the password that could save him in a crisis. The sense of decay – moral, physical, political – hangs over every frame.

Stylistically, the film feels rooted in the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s. The discordant piano score underscores a story that constantly wrong-foots the audience – we never know what’s coming next, and it never ends the way we expect. Beneath the gunfire and ideology, though, lies something more human: a story of family, legacy, and guilt. The political and the personal bleed together until they’re indistinguishable.

‘One Battle After Another’ works because it dares to be messy. It’s both grand and intimate, savage and deeply emotional. A brutal modern fable about how the battles we think we’ve finished are never truly over – they just change shape, and start again.