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A Most Violent Year: Vampires, Families, 2025 in Film
MIchael B. Jordan in Sinners Since our 2019 winter edition, the brilliant Mark Asch has done something here that isn’t our default position; he’s examined films together, not in isolation, and has teased out what, for him, are their deeper meanings and interconnections—how they say something about our society today. Here, he considers images inside and outside the arthouse, finding trenchant, sometimes troubling messages elided by rote awards season discourse. — Scott Macaulay
I remember about a decade ago when Charlie Kirk was a teenage gimmick, a debate-club prodigy haunting college campuses demanding to be taken seriously, provoking protests and deplatformings and then spinning this resistance to his various hateful beliefs as an attack on the notions of free speech and the open exchange of ideas. His appeal to liberal values was a way to amass acknowledgment, civility and legitimacy for his Christian nationalism, making room on the spectrum of acceptable public opinion for a political program that has now achieved its final form as a sustained act of violence: masked state agents abducting people off the street and secreting them to black sites in foreign countries, the erasure of trans identities, the refusal to fund food stamps, the push-button execution of Venezuelans in boats. That such acts are frequently carried out in open defiance of court orders and other supposed institutional checks recalls another extractive adventurer, Ferdinand Magellan, who, in Lav Diaz’s Magellan, pushes his voyage’s priest to break the seal of confession and name the names of potential subversives aboard. When the priest refuses to aid in his power grab, Magellan simply maroons him for dead in South America alongside the expedition’s supposed co-leader, the padre’s howling appeals to God, the King and other abstractions of authority falling on deafened ears.
I haven’t viewed the Charlie Kirk snuff film, but I suspect that more people have watched him die than will ever see the movie I was watching when it happened, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, the testimony of a photojournalist, Fatima Hassouna, who was assassinated by the IDF for bearing witness to a genocide that Kirk enthusiastically supported. Kirk’s killing was answered with a rushed memorial service held in a football stadium, a super-sized halftime show complete with pyrotechnics and arena rock, broadcast live across several networks. As with the concurrent digital vigilante campaign to fire the insufficiently reverent, it was a spectacle designed to overpower, which suggests to me a shiver of panic, as though someone had talked back to these people in the only language they deign to understand.
The movies of 2025 are movies about violence: what forms it takes, who it serves and, in particular, what inhibits or disinhibits it.
Michael B. Jordan’s Tommy gun rampage toward the end of Sinners, an act of cleansing violence carried out against the local Klan, has the virtue of clarity, not just because his targets are bent on his own extermination but because it logically follows the principled separatism of the juke joint he had founded the night before, a for-us-by-us palace where invisible threads of cultural connection to past and future are unearthed— that is, before the whole edifice is undone by the vampires on the doorstep, who first attempt to worm their way in with appeals to civility, comity and cross-cultural discourse.
Under the guise of grindhouse convention, Ryan Coogler can indulge in a vision of righteous vengeance that would not otherwise be permissible in polite society. It Was Just an Accident also has a blood-red climax in which the oppressed turn the tables on their tormentors. It’s an arthouse moral fable for an audience that lacks a direct experience of violence and is commensurately uncomfortable using it. Jordan’s character dies after his rampage and so traces of the violence that marked him remain in society only as vestiges, sublimated into the blues of his musician cousin or carried along the nocturnal fringe by his bloodsucker twin. Jafar Panahi starts where Coogler leaves off. Violence is prelude to It Was Just an Accident, which, as its victimized characters debate how to treat their torturer, is less a free and open debate about ethics than an experiment in free will and choice. Though the characters wonder what type of action would be necessary, effective and just, the film asks what type of action is possible and which avenues remain open to them once the violence of the world has bent them into unnatural shapes. Is it simply inevitable that, with their target in their sight, they would take the shot?
One Battle After Another, the most optimistic film of the year, ends on a Black American girl who, like Michael B. Jordan in Sinners, has felt white supremacy bearing down on her with murderous intent and killed in self-defense. Somehow, she has not been irreversibly corroded by the violence she’s been the subject or object of. The film ends with this seasoned radical heading off to a protest, a demonstration or act of civil disobedience like the ones in the documentary WTO/99, whose idealists are seen shouting “non-violent!” as they’re tear-gassed and arrested en masse. Why then does her white father—on the couch, in keeping with the slacktivism of his adult praxis, which boils down mostly to virtue-signaling complaints about the public school curriculum and watching Battle of Algiers—simply advise her, on her way out the door, to “be careful”? As if being careful kept the cops’ boots off anyone’s neck in WTO/99; as if those boots weren’t those of the foot soldiers of an emergent world order. And why does she indulge his concern for her mere safety? Knowing what they both know, why not choose violence? Because they have each other—because the main conflict in the film is not between Antifa and fascism but rather between revolution, which dreams of dynamism, and family, which dreams of stasis.
I’ve read debate over whether Paul Thomas Anderson’s politics are sufficiently articulated or his depiction of resistance tactics sufficiently prescriptive. But it seems clear enough that One Battle After Another is not so much “saying” something about revolutionary violence as it is expressing the idea, which is surely a plausible reflection of the way people weigh these things in real life, that love is the only thing in the world more important than justice. Family ties make for bad martyrs; this is perhaps why Perfidia, a restless new mom, acts like a lone gunman during a collective action and starts shooting during what was supposed to be a simple bank heist. She proves, at least, that she’s got nothing to lose.
One Battle After Another dramatizes an evolution that Ari Aster withholds from his characters in Eddington. Joaquin Phoenix’s Sheriff Joe begins that movie watching YouTube videos about how to convince your wife to have a baby but eventually takes out a political opponent with a sniper rifle as he and his spouse become ever more alienated from each other. In the relationship between Ghetto Pat and Perfidia, Anderson shows the thrill and unease of riding with people who are comfortable using violence—it’s adrenal, self-consciously cinematic, powerfully sexual to tumble headlong into total commitment, whether to a righteous cause or a lustful urge. But it’s also scary and unsustainable to act so heedlessly. As Ghetto Pat ages into Bob Ferguson, the thing he has to lose, his daughter Willa, is the attachment that makes his life worth living.
There’s a seed of nihilism that blossoms within even the most constructive violence; reading about today’s various assassins facing the federal death penalty, one is conscious of the lives from which they have willingly absented themselves—the lives of the people they leave notes for or send incriminating apology texts to. Duly enough, a striking number of this year’s films present family bonds as insufficient restraint against violence and other acts of free radicalism. While some of 2025’s cinematic girl dads, like Bob Ferguson and Benicio del Toro’s Zsa-zsa in The Phoenician Scheme, feel their daughters’ eyes on them, there is also No Other Choice, in which a family man under pressure to provide for his kids’ material comfort stalks his rivals for an executive job like a LinkedIn networker, comparing their resumes and orchestrating meetings before he kills them—a Luigi Mangione
who aims down, rather than up, the corporate ladder. (Both he and his targets in the paper business were formerly honored as “Pulp Man of the Year,” which sounds like the trophy you get for letting your job grind you down into raw wet tissue.) His mirror, perhaps, is the unseen runaway raver daughter in Sirāt, whose flight from her family precedes the apocalyptic breakdown that hangs over the film, shattering biological and chosen families.
The Mastermind is set in the early 1970s, when the radical groups on which One Battle After Another’s French 75 is modeled were robbing banks and armored cars to fund the revolution, and it concerns a young father who pulls off an armed robbery of his own, liberating a few paintings—but to no particular end. Like Perfidia in the bank, J.B. Mooney in the museum is pulling off not a heist but an escape act, finding in crime a new identity as a fugitive and a way to disappear himself from his domestic responsibilities. Despite moving through a milieu of dropouts and draft dodgers agitated by the revolutionary zeitgeist, he chooses no new causes in his family’s stead; like the patriarch of No Other Choice, his avowals that he’s only doing this for his family ring increasingly hollow as he drifts further away on a frolic all his own.
Mothers can act out, too. Alongside the shot of a heavily pregnant Perfidia at the target range, Teyana Taylor howling as she fires off an automatic rifle cradled against her belly, the thrill of atavism literally butting up against her obligations to nurture, place any number of shots of Jennifer Lawrence crying, screaming, throwing up in Die My Love as a frustrated, feral new mom waging a one-woman guerilla campaign against the expectations of marriage. In If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, another unruly woman chafes against her responsibilities. Rose Byrne crumples under the pressure of a high-stress job, a husband on a seemingly open-ended business trip, and a needy daughter with a complicated medical situation—a daughter that Mary Bronstein’s camera keeps out of sight for the bulk of the movie, as though teasing Byrne’s character with the possibility of her child’s unreality, which would mean that she could just walk away. She stretches the elastic of mother love as far as it will go, stealing time away from her daughter during long walks and drinking binges. “Snapping,” in this context, could mean either giving in to her temper or flying off somewhere, maybe never to be found. At the height of her anger, she is provoked to wonder whether anything is really keeping her around, which is also the argument that Pat and Perfidia have before she goes off to rob the bank.
Suburbia—in the words of Lewis Mumford, a “child-centered environment”—didn’t do any better than parenthood at holding back the tides of violence. In two of the year’s more disappointing films, entitlement is shown to be more important than community in the logic of close-knit neighborhoods. In Weapons, Ring cameras capture footage of half a town’s third graders running through darkened cul-de-sac streets and out of their parents’ lives, their arms stiff and outstretched like they’re flying, in a dark mirror of the bicycle scene in E.T. They are pulled gravitationally to absence as if by a pied piper or, in a parallel the film emphasizes, by the cruel randomness of a school shooting, victims of an American death drive against which the family is an insufficient hedge. Their parents then lash outward, blaming their children’s teacher for their disappearance the way other, similar parents blame teachers for indoctrinating their kids with politics or gender ideology. The lifted truck–driving dad played by Josh Brolin, in particular, steeps in grievance and reviews the Ring camera footage of his kid over and over again, the same way he would review footage of a package disappearing from his porch. The motif suggests a synthesis of nuclear family and private property. This is a strong start, but Ring footage then helps Brolin locate the witch who has arrived from parts unknown to terrorize the town and find the lost children; Zach Cregger’s film ultimately validates the same paranoia that informs the true-crime genre.
The Perfect Neighbor also uses suburban surveillance to identify an old witch and enemy of local children. Here, too, it’s a Ring camera that captures the sound of Susan Lorincz shooting a neighbor, but the story of the escalating violence that precedes the act is told through bodycam footage of police responding to Lorincz’s complaints of trespassing whenever the local kids play on an adjacent yard. As with Weapons, The Perfect Neighbor is more chilling and convincing in its first half, in which surveillance technology and techniques that were designed to safeguard property end up documenting the inadequacy of our built environment to foster interconnectedness. But like Weapons, it ultimately uses the tools of paranoia and entitlement to revert to genre. In Weapons, the decrepit Aunt Gladys with her Lynn Yaeger wig and clown makeup is a trope of elevated horror, and in The Perfect Neighbor’s cop’s-eye-view interrogation room footage, Lorincz is a villain fit for a rubbernecking Netflix true-crime hit. Both films explore, then exploit, the antisocial hypervigilance described by John Carpenter’s The Thing at the outset of the Reagan Revolution: nobody trusts anybody now, and we’re all very tired.
Weapons, like fellow non-IP auteur titles Sinners and One Battle After Another, was a box-office blockbuster for Warner Brothers—the historic home of “beloved franchises” such as Casablanca, in the words of a Netflix email blast heralding the streamer’s intended acquisition of the studio. The ink on the deal was still wet as I filed this piece, but Ted Sarandos had already started talking about shorter, “more consumer-friendly” theatrical windows for WB releases, and a Hollywood Reporter article suggested that Netflix could use Warners’ “rich well of content” to build out its AI capabilities, “either to train [its] own studio on or give to consumers to play with.”
The WB/Netflix merger depends upon approval from the antitrust division of the Trump administration’s Department of Justice, which might surely prefer the rival bid from regime ally David Ellison, who greased the wheels for his own antitrust-flaunting acquisition of Paramount with ideological purges at CBS and the hiring of culture warrior Bari Weiss to run CBS News; overpaying to broadcast UFC fights live from the White House lawn; and, apparently, bringing back the director of the forthcoming FLOTUS profile Melania, Brett Ratner, largely absent from the industry following 2017 sexual assault allegations, to make Rush Hour 4 at the president’s behest, in something like a command performance. Ellison and Sarandos now loom shoulder-to-shoulder at the entryway of Warner Brothers, like the vampires surrounding Sinners’ juke joint.
Dracula parodies the kind of movie heritage we’ll be left with if we let the vampires in. Radu Jude’s antic and self-loathing film interrupts low-budget adaptations of obscure Romanian texts with ostensibly crowd-pleasing pornographic GenAI imagery, regurgitating national myth—another rich well of content—as hallucinatory slop. In one of the film’s strands, financially precarious Romanians cash in on the local legend of Vlad the Impaler with a kitschy tourist-trap reenactment that devolves into sex work and a vampire hunt that draws real blood—giving the national IP to consumers to play with and sucking the last few drops out of it before it runs totally dry.
Who’ll stop the vampires from coming in? The violence that permeated American life in 2025 walked in through the front door, thuggishness empowered by executive order and enabled by the careless stewardship, or worse, of the executive class. Warners’ David Zaslav stands to earn $500 million if the Netflix deal goes through, a reward for creating “shareholder value,” not incidentally by devaluing the shared space of the movie theater. For every Michael B. Jordan standing guard at the juke-joint threshold, there’s a nightspot owner like the tech oligarch played by Danny Huston in The Naked Gun, who, told that you can’t say certain words anymore, shrugs off evolving speech norms like the Secretary of War renaming a woke Navy vessel: “In my club, you can.” It’s just that simple.
Since I began writing these annual year-in-review pieces, I’ve liked to sign off by wishing my friends and other readers a happy new year. But every year since I began writing them has turned out stupider and more evil than the last, and now I’m finished.
