The Exhaustion Is the Point: Why I Appreciated, But Didn’t Enjoy, “One Battle After Another”

You’ve heard the buzz. It’s impossible to ignore.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s new epic, One Battle After Another, has landed with the force of a cultural comet. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and a revelatory Teyana Taylor, the film has been hailed as a masterpiece. Critics are throwing around 10/10 scores. It’s been declared an early Oscar frontrunner. Within days of its release, it rocketed into the IMDB Top 250, a rare feat reserved for instant classics.

I went to see it on opening weekend, steeped in this hype, ready for the next There Will Be Blood.

I left the cinema two hours and forty minutes later feeling… exhausted.

I recognized the artistry. I understood the director’s objective. I saw the towering performances. But I didn’t enjoy it. And for days, I’ve been trying to unpack why. My conclusion is a strange one: One Battle After Another is a film meticulously designed to wear you down. The exhaustion isn’t a bug; it’s the central feature.

But this grand artistic experiment is walking a tightrope. And for me, that tightrope snapped, because the entire experience was sabotaged by one simple, practical failure: my cinema was freezing cold.

This combination—a film designed to test my patience and a theater designed to test my physical endurance—crystalized a paradox I’d never considered: in the modern age, are “difficult” auteur films like this actually better viewed from the comfort of your own home?

My analysis of the film is now inextricably linked to this realization.

The Hype Bubble and the Divisive Truth

Let’s start with that IMDB score. Any film buff knows that the Top 250 is sacred ground. Seeing a new release crash onto that list is baffling, but it’s also a clear symptom of the “hype bubble.” The first people to see a new PTA film are PTA fans. They are critics and cinephiles who are pre-disposed to love his dense, challenging style. They flood the ratings with 10/10s, temporarily elevating the film to sit alongside The Godfather.

The reality, as I experienced it, is that One Battle After Another is perhaps the most divisive film of the decade. It’s not a crowd-pleaser; it’s an endurance test. And the reasons for this are woven into its very DNA.

The Tyranny of the Title: A Film Built to Frustrate

The title, spoken by DiCaprio’s character, Bob, in the chaotic opening siege, is the movie’s thesis statement: “From here on out, it’s one battle after another.”

PTA takes this literally. The film is not a story with a rising and falling action; it is a flat, cyclical, and relentless series of crises. It is a narrative built on frustration. Every single element of its construction is designed to deny the audience a sense of satisfaction or completion.

Think about the micro-details. I became obsessed with a tiny, recurring subplot: Bob trying to charge his dying phone. It’s a mundane, modern “battle” we all know. But in this film, he can never complete the task. Every time he finds a charger, every time he plugs it in, a new, more urgent battle (a phone call, an attack, a discovery) interrupts him. The battery percentage becomes a source of supreme anxiety, a perfect metaphor for the characters’ lives: they can never recharge, never find a moment of peace, before the next crisis hits.

Now apply this to the macro structure. The film’s climactic “chase scene” is a masterpiece of anti-action. A normal thriller chase is linear; it builds tension toward a single explosive confrontation. This chase is a cyclical nightmare. It’s an agonizingly long “back-and-forth” and “up-and-down” across the same stretch of hilly roads. The cars stall. They go in reverse. They stop. They start again. It’s not thrilling; it’s annoying. It’s a traffic jam from hell.

PTA isn’t trying to excite you; he’s trying to make you feel the same bone-deep exhaustion and “will this ever end?” panic as the characters. It’s a brilliant artistic choice.

But it’s also, well, tiring. The film’s tone is just as chaotic. It careens wildly from brutal, realistic violence to broad, slapstick comedy. It feels like a movie that “doesn’t know what it wants to be.” Is it a serious political drama? A stoner comedy? A family thriller? A grotesque satire?

The answer, of course, is “yes.”

The Absurdity of the “Cold Take”

Once you step back from the film—what I call the “cold-take”—you realize that the entire world is built on a foundation of pure absurdity.

While you’re watching it, the stakes feel real. You’re caught in the tension. But when you reflect on it, the entire social framework is preposterous. The warring factions are completely insane.

You have the “French 75,” the revolutionary group, with their elaborate codes, internal hierarchies, and rigid rules. And on the other side, you have the “Christmas Adventurers Club,” the white-nationalist villains, with their equally bizarre traditions and secret regulations.

As I reflected, I realized: this is the whole point.

These groups are not ideologies; they are rival cults. They have become so obsessed with their own rituals and internal power struggles that they’ve become completely divorced from the real-world issues they claim to be fighting over. Immigration, social disparity, and poverty aren’t the subject of the film; they are the forgotten backdrop for the pointless, self-perpetuating “battles” these absurd groups wage against each other.

It’s a searing, cynical critique of modern polarization. It’s a film about how extremism, left or right, eventually just becomes a performance of its own rules. The “casino after casino” of chaos these groups generate is the only tangible result of their struggle. It’s brilliant. It’s also deeply unsettling and, again, exhausting.

The Battle of the Performances: The Monster vs. The Inept “Hero”

This subversive structure extends to the performances, which I found fascinating. The entire cast is phenomenal, but the film truly rests on the tension between Sean Penn and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Let’s be clear: this is Sean Penn’s movie. His portrayal of the villain, Col. Lockjaw, is one of the most terrifying I’ve ever seen. He has physically transformed—the rigid walk, the bulging veins in his neck, the involuntary facial tics. He is a monster. But as I watched, I realized he’s a monster who is just barely “borderline.” He’s a caricature, but he never quite crosses the line into being unbelievable. He remains grounded in a recognizable, pathetic, and hateful reality. He is the most successful element of the film, a walking embodiment of its controlled chaos.

And then there’s Leonardo DiCaprio.

It took me half the film to realize what PTA was doing with him, and it’s a stroke of genius. He made me laugh, not because DiCaprio was “funny,” but because he was so utterly inept.

We are programmed to see DiCaprio as the hero. He’s the star. He’s the engine. But Bob is a non-character. He is a black hole of passivity. In the first half, the real protagonist is Perfidia (Teyana Taylor); she is the motor, the charisma, the revolutionary force. Bob is just “her boyfriend.”

In the second half, the real protagonist is his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). She is the one who is calm, competent, and clear-eyed. She practically has to save herself. Bob, meanwhile, is a paranoid, bumbling, stoner dad who panics, fails at simple tasks (like charging his phone), and is dragged through the plot by forces stronger than him.

The film subverts our expectations by casting one of the world’s biggest movie stars and making him the most useless person in the story. He’s the failed patriarch, the retired revolutionary who discovers he was never revolutionary at all—he was just along for the ride.

The Final Battle: The Film vs. The Freezing Cold Cinema

I recognized all of this. I saw the craft. I understood the subversive genius of the performances, the structure, and the theme.

So why did I leave the theater feeling so cold—literally and figuratively?

Because, as I sat there, shivering, I realized the film was asking me to endure two distinct types of fatigue at the same time.

1. The Intentional Fatigue: The artistic exhaustion from the film’s relentless, cyclical, and frustrating narrative. This is the “art.”
2. The Involuntary Fatigue: The physical exhaustion from sitting in a freezing cold (“al gelo,” as we say in Italian) theater for nearly three hours. This is the “failed experience.”

The film’s artistic demand for my patience was total. It’s a “lean-in” movie that requires your full, undivided, and comfortable attention. But the cinema’s physical failure was a “push-out” force. The cold was a constant, nagging distraction.

My “Involuntary Fatigue” completely cannibalized my capacity for “Intentional Fatigue.” I couldn’t appreciate the artful exhaustion because I was too busy being just… exhausted.

This experience crystallized the film’s ultimate paradox and confirmed a suspicion I’ve had for a while. It all comes back to another PTA masterpiece: There Will Be Blood. That is also a long, heavy, and psychologically “tiring” film. It’s a masterpiece that I love, but it’s a film I adore watching at home. At home, I can control the environment. I can pause it, breathe, and process its intensity.

It feels heretical to say, but I believe One Battle After Another is a film made for the streaming era. The very things that make it a challenging work of art—its length, its deliberate pace, its dense themes—are the same things that make it incredibly vulnerable to a single bad theatrical experience.

The cinema, once the temple for the auteur, has become a liability. If the seats are bad, the audio is off, or the temperature is arctic, the fragile pact between a “difficult” film and its audience is broken.

I can’t wait to watch One Battle After Another again in a year, on my sofa, with a blanket and the pause button. I suspect then, and only then, I will finally be able to see the masterpiece everyone else is talking about.