Anderson and Aster

Luis Fernández-Galiano

20/10/2025

American cinema examines the state of the nation through two fables that combine farce with grand guignol. Both produced in 2025 and premiered in Spain in September, One Battle After Another is the tenth film of Paul Thomas Anderson (Los Angeles, 1970) and perhaps his most political; Eddington is the fourth of Ari Aster (New York, 1986), and definitely the most chaotic. The two movies share a determination to reflect the current moment of the country through crazy satire, thrilling action, interminable footage (170 and 145 minutes), and charismatic leading characters (Leonardo DiCaprio and Joaquin Phoenix). But whereas Anderson allows humor and warmth to soften the diagnosis, Aster brings arbitrary violence to extremes, fending off all wisps of hope. The United States is going through a period so absurd, irrational, and unpredictable as to render reassuring the continued critical independence and visual power of its filmmakers, who through the test tube of narrative microcosms portray the ailments of its social body.

Paul Thomas Anderson has for two decades been acknowledged as the most gifted American director of what is called art-house cinema. From the endearing Boogie Nights (1997) or Magnolia (1999) to the operatic There Will Be Blood (2007), his work is inhabited by desperate, dysfunctional, or solitary people, making predictable his affinity with the elusive writer Thomas Pynchon, a symphonic narrator of American disintegration – who incidentally has just published Shadow Ticket, twelve years after Bleeding Edge – whose 2009 novel Inherent Vice he transferred to the screen in 2014, and who now vaguely draws from his 1990 Vineland to journey from the failure of countercultural activism in the time of the Black Panthers to the supremacist proto-fascism of today. With a frenetic pace, the odyssey of a father to rescue his daughter brings together a mix of picturesque personalities, from the corrupt and paranoid military officer played by Sean Penn to the placid martial arts teacher enacted by Benicio del Toro, and all of them around the ex-revolutionary DiCaprio and his daughter Chase Infiniti, the movie’s best revelation. The repetitive, oppressive music by Jonny Greenwood (instrumentalist and composer of the British band Radiohead) punctuates the breathless action that goes from terrorist acts in defense of immigrants, carried out by the group led by the African American Teyana Taylor, to the adventure many years later that gathers retired radicals in the search for a missing girl. Inevitably sprinkled with cinematographic references, - including explicit ones like the appearance on a TV screen of Gillo Pontecorvo’s La battaglia di Algeri, a 1966 cult movie - and refreshed with moments of humor as memorable as DiCaprio’s inability to remember the password he needs to cry for help, the film is as much an emotional drama on family ties as it is a call for social resistance in the face of the world’s deplorable state.

One Battle After Another

Ari Aster, after delivering sophisticated terror in Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), two films received with mixed reviews, debuted in dark comedy in Beau is Afraid (2023), and now returns with Joaquin Phoenix as the main character in an unabashedly violent political western that sets its protagonist – a sheriff overwhelmed by measures taken at the start of the covid pandemic as well as by the emotional block of his wife Emma Stone – against the mayor Pedro Pascal, a progressive or corrupt elected authority who wants to pull a small town out of its lethargy by building a data center. Through this minute piece of America parade some extravagant, unhinged individuals, embodying all and every one of today’s currents: political polarization, the tension of social networks, conspiracy theories, the Black Lives Matter movement, arms proliferation, the fracture of families and communities, emotional anarchy, social paranoia, and more. This is a bitter and cacophonic satire that tries to avoid the blame game amid an absurd, catastrophic, and terrifying situation that has managed to demolish all efforts at interpretation or rational analysis, and reveals a country and a world steep in the process of decomposing. The microcosm of Eddington and the successive combats of One Battle After Another paint a desperate diagnosis of the loss of control in our societies and our lives, but this sharp, merciless scalpel may be precisely what we need to put the sick body of our culture on the track to recovery.