The best thing about One Battle After Another is how it doesn’t demand that you keep up—it simply expects it. Paul Thomas Anderson drops the audience directly into a world that looks and sounds a lot like ours, and yet in this world there’s a fairly competent revolution rising up against the recognizable bloom of facism, a xenophobic underground cabal that’s running and drinking tea out of Christmas Spode, and for the first quarter of the movie, a sexy sort of Bonnie-and-Clyde thing between—sorry, just checking my notes here—Teyana Taylor and Leonardo DiCaprio. And we simply have to keep up.
And then, just as quickly as we’re dropped into this chaotic cacophony, DiCaprio’s Bob (nee Ghetto Pat, nee Rocket Man) goes from launching explosives and shouting “fuck the police” to being almost compulsively incapable of not saying, “What’s up homie, you good,” to a young man who’s picking up Bob’s now teenage daughter, Willa, before the school dance. In a split-second time jump of 16 years, Bob has gone from trying to change the world to weeping as Willa’s teacher tells him what a confident leader she’s become. And that’s probably because, in the same time period, Bob has morphed into an unrecognizable version of himself, dulled into complacency by weed and booze, bolstered only by a fatherly confidence that he somehow still knows best. “I know how to drink and drive, Willa,” Bob scoffs at his teenage daughter as she cleans up his beer cans.
In some ways, One Battle After Another is like no other movie I’ve ever seen before, completely singular in its breakneck plot, somehow simultaneously prescient and timeless. But in other ways, I walked out of that theater hearing the spectral whisper of Liam Neeson and his particular set of skills. I found myself humming the tune of Hugh Jackman and Amanda Seyfried singing “In My Life.” Overcome by the image of a harried but wet-eyed Steve Martin smiling sweetly in a tuxedo…
Fathers of daughters are everywhere for those with eyes to it, and One Battle After Another doesn’t just go directly into the Girl Dad Movie Canon—it elevates it. Putting aside the fact that Willa and Bob live in a sort of bespoke witness protection program, there was something so very familiar about watching this washed-up dude try to tell his highly capable daughter how to live her life as she blinks back at him with obvious skepticism. As well as the fact that once Willa is abducted by Sean Penn (doing an all-time impression of RFK Jr., if RFK Jr.’s brain worm were actually Vince McMahon), Bob mostly just tries to keep up while his daughter goes about saving herself by using all the life lessons he thought she wasn’t listening to.
One Battle After Another has a lot going on, but at its core, it’s a movie made by a dad of teenage daughters, about a dad of a teenage daughter struggling to accept that the reward of raising a child well is seeing her surpass you in every conceivable way. And remembering that when that time comes, you have to turn on your listening ears, hurry your ass into that car, and charge your damn phone. This is a rich tradition, with countless touchstones. In his desperation to get Willa back—and also let her go—Bob instantly became one part Taken dad and one part Father of the Bride dad, with a hint of Les Misérables amidst-a-revolution found father, packaged inside the schlubby pre-makeover complacency of Crazy, Stupid Love dad.
What other movies is One Battle After Another joining the ranks of, you may ask? It might help to first set some guidelines. The films of the Girl Dad Movie Canon, of course, adhere to the following rules:
- The movie has a father figure
- The movie has a daughter figure
- The movie only has daughter figure
- The daughters can have mothers, but they really need to be doing their own thin
- These are not movies for dads, these are movies about dads with daughter
- This is not a canon of on-screen girl dads; this is a canon of Girl Dad Movie
- The movie had a cultural impac
And with that, let’s officially induct One Battle After Another into the Girl Dad Movie Canon, which breaks down into nine easy-to-understand subgenres…
Daughter Finding Father (Ranked from Least to Most Deadbeat Dad)
Sometimes dads don’t know they’re Dads—either literally, because Meryl Streep didn’t tell them, or figuratively, because they just decided it was fine to forget the fact that they brought a child into this world. Either way, if their progeny is spunky, it is likely she will track him down and make him remember he’s not just a dad. He’s her dad.
Mamma Mia!
A rare instance of all dads marked innocent from emotionally and/or literally abandoning their daughter! Sophie invites all three of the men who she believes could potentially be her father—each of whom her mother, Donna, never told that they could potentially have a daughter—and as chaos ensues and new relationships develop, the three dads, Donna, and Sophie all decide they don’t need to know the truth, because they can all be her dad. A movie that rejects paternal ego in the name of putting the daughter first? Maybe all Girl Dad Movies should be Girl Dad Musical Movies based on the works of ABBA?
What a Girl Wants
Why are you, as Colin Firth playing a potentially excellent girl dad and future prime minister, not looking a little deeper into the American love of your life disappearing because she was scared of being under the constant supervision of your aristocratic family, so that when your very American daughter, Amanda Bynes, shows up looking for you with a slew of scandalous spaghetti-strap dresses and public pratfalls, history is not doomed to repeat itself? Learn to stand up for yourself, Colin Firth!
Crawl
We talk a lot as a society about what it means to be a father of daughters, but not nearly enough about how being the daughter of a father sometimes means racing to use her particular set of skills (collegiate swimmer, from Florida) to save his estranged ass from an alligat– sorry, make that several hurricane-emboldened alligators.
The Parent Trap
I can hold two truths at once. Dennis Quaid plays one of the sexiest girl dads ever put to film, and he also happens to be rich, own a vineyard, and still know how to get his hands dirty. At the same time … splitting identical twins apart, planning to never tell them, and completely abandoning one of them because you and your ex-wife can’t get along is objectively fucked up. Nevertheless, every time he chokes up and realizes that one of the little girls is the one he hasn’t seen since she was an infant, I cry enough tears to keep the Queen Elizabeth 2 afloat.
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
This movie is like your dad doing mushrooms and trying to tell you a story from the good old days, but it just sounds like some weird dream he had: “I found a daughter in a barn, and she followed me to America to marry Mike Pence and seduce Rudy Giuliani, but then COVID-19 happened!” All right dad, let’s put away those mushrooms and get you to bed!
Father Finding Daughter (Not Ranked, Because the Dads Literally Always Find Their Taken Daughters)
In the Girl Dad Movie Canon, having your daughter taken from you by a criminal and/or natural disaster (as opposed to a series of poor personal decisions and/or hurtful behavior over the course of a lifetime) is, like, the least chill thing that can happen to a dad.
Taken
“I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills—skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.”
Searching
I’m not a dad, but I also have a particular set of skills—being really online—that could have helped John Cho’s character, who in Searching is trying to find his missing daughter exclusively from the unique point of view of her beloved laptop and smartphone.
Prisoners
Two girl dads, one Jake Gyllenhaal, one twist, and one extremely dark movie
One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson’s entry into the Girl Dad Movie Canon is so profoundly girl-dad-centric that it really could have fallen into several different categories. But even though Bob ultimately does very little of substance to save Willa from her captors, it’s his desperation to find his daughter no matter the consequences that drives the entire bonkers story. The fact that so many of Willa’s most ingenious plays to successfully escape her abduction appear to be a direct result of her father’s teachings—who she probably spent much of her life rolling her eyes at—means that, at the end of the road (I know, I know), even if she was capable of saving herself, badass daughters can still need their bumbling dads.
Found Fathers (Ranked from Reformed Criminals to Current Criminals)
They’re the dads who stepped up.
Les Misérables
Jean Valjean, you are the father … archetype. From dirtbag to doting dad, this random guy pledged his paternal allegiance to Cosette and never wavered. He even did some late-in-life, somewhat begrudging revolutionaryism when it meant making his adopted daughter happy. Sound familiar?
Logan
Hugh Jackman, with three entries on this list, you are the archetype for the archetype.
Gifted
Chris Evans as a full-fledged girl dad to the second coming of the Fanning sisters, McKenna Grace, would have been too powerful, which is why they made him a guardian uncle instead. Still, canonically speaking, a dad.
Paper Moon
Tatum O’Neal’s Academy Award–winning turn as a tiny con-daughter to her adopted con-dad and real-life father, Ryan O’Neal, will always be the Girl Dad Movie blueprint, if not a specific story that necessarily needs repeating.
The Rock Is in It (Ranked from Least to Most Rock)
If you’re wondering why Moana wasn’t in the Found Fathers category, it’s because Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson deserves a girl dad category all his own. If this was a Disaster Dad Movie Canon (coming to The Ringer dot com in 2026 for Disaster Week or The Rock Week or Dad Week—these are all pitches, please take me seriously), Johnson would simply run the board. But even when you whittle it down to just girl-dadding, he’s completed an entire finding-dad hat trick in under a decade
Moana
Maui and Moana, finding family and demigod strength on the ocean.
The Game Plan
Another day, another daughter finding her dad after her mom decided not to tell him about the pregnancy so he could focus on his future as a professional football player.
San Andreas
The Rock is never more at home than when he’s battling the most extreme elements to find and save the innocent. For the Rock, and the characters he plays, natural disasters are really a time to bring the family together around the hearth (helicopter) and remember what’s most important in this life (rescuing your family from skyscrapers). In San Andreas, the Rock does what he does best: rescues his estranged wife from a skyscraper in the helicopter he happens to be flying during an earthquake in L.A., and then flies over to save his daughter, Alexandra Daddario, from the rubble of a different earthquake in San Francisco, where she was abandoned by her mom’s boyfriend. Not very girl dad of him, not very dad-who-stepped-up.
A Fanning Sister Is in It (Ranked from Tiniest Fanning Performance to Tallest Fanning Performance)
And if you’re wondering why Man On Fire wasn’t in Found Fathers or Fathers Finding Daughters, that is because the Fanning Sisters and their photogenic precociousness also created a Girl Dad Movie oeuvre all their own in just under a decade, which is to say nothing of all their other roles.
I Am Sam
Tiny Dakota Fanning with her on-screen father, Sean Penn, problematically cast—as opposed to just horrifyingly characterized, as in One Battle—as a person with an intellectual disability.
Man On Fire
Slightly Taller Dakota Fanning and her on-screen found—and finding—father (figure), Denzel Washington.
War of the Worlds
The tallest yet—but honestly still pretty tiny—Dakota Fanning and her father, Tom Cruise, battling apocalyptic aliens (tripods, not Thetans, to clear up any confusion).
Somewhere
Elle Fanning, who is almost always tall, and her on-screen father, Stephen Dorff, playing a famous but existentially spiraling actor. Somewhere is not Sophia Coppola’s only—or likely last—dip into depicting girl dads on-screen.
Dads Doing Their Best in Difficult Situations (Ranked from Least to Most Difficult Situation)
A pretty central conceit of modern Girl Dad Movies is that the dads aren’t perfect, but they’re trying. Gone are the days where a dad had to be a straightforward deadbeat to engage a movie audience! These days, girl dads can be deadbeats; they can be dirtbags; they can be basically decent dads who have simply reached a crossroads in their lives that they don’t know how to navigate with a baby onboard. These dads have found themselves in particularly difficult circumstances alongside their daughters.
Hearts Beat Loud
The difficult situation: Trying to get your teenage daughter to do something she doesn’t really want to do, like start a band with you, her dad.
The Nice Guys
The difficult situation: A daughter who’s a little too interested in your work, and won’t stop sneaking into your car, giving your work frenemy YooHoos, and saying “and stuff,” even after you’ve told her not to for the millionth time.
The Descendants
The difficult situation: The logistical burden of generational wealth!
After Yang
The difficult situation: ROBOTS!
The Lovely Bones
The difficult situation: Trying to uncover who murdered your daughter while she’s stuck in purgatory between heaven and earth, trying to decide if she should seek vengeance on Stanley Tucci from limbo or let her family heal following her death!!!
Face/Off
The difficult situation: You had the bright idea to transplant your archnemesis’ face onto your own face, but then your archnemesis got ahold of your face, so now someone with your face is keeping your daughter hostage, even if she doesn’t know it!
Trap
The difficult situation: Being a sociopath and a girl dad.
Matchmaking (Ranked from Least to Most Widowed)
In film, there is nothing sexier than a man who has been widowed. It means that he has loved and lost through no fault of his own. (A male widower is also the best thing you can be on the Bachelorette franchise.) Matchmaking is perhaps the only Girl Dad Movie trope that there is exactly none of in One Battle After Another, but rest assured that the single dad is widowed (well, at least conceivably). Some aren’t so lucky.
One Fine Day
A rare case of a single girl dad getting to be divorced instead of widowed, but a common case of Mae Whitman being the most adorable working actor of the ’90s. Casting her as the tiny daughter of ER-era George Clooney was diabolical.
Definitely, Maybe
This movie has a perfect 2008 rom-com cast—Ryan Reynolds, Abigail Breslin, Isla Fisher, Elizabeth Banks, Rachel Weisz—and a deeply strange plot about a girl dad telling his daughter about all of his past significant relationships (using pseudonyms) on the eve of his divorce from her mother, making her figure out which one is her mom, which one is the true love of his life, and—I think—which one is bisexual. It ends with a turducken of girl daddery though, with Ryan Reynolds giving Isla Fisher (not bisexual, not divorced, but his one true love!) the inscribed copy of Jane Eyre that her girl dad had given her, but was lost for years. I honestly could have sworn Ryan Reynolds was widowed in this, but that’s because little Abigail Breslin has a very chill stance on her parents getting divorced. She lets her dad know he needs to stop messing around telling dad stories, and get Isla Fisher that fucking book.
The Holiday
Also known as Jude Law’s hottest film, and it’s not a coincidence that he’s girl-dadding in it. Law is infallible as a widowed father, brought together with a flustered Cameron Diaz by the fates, his sister Kate Winslet, and two of the cutest little British moppets you ever did see. He spends weekends buying tutus. He’s learning to sew. He’s Mr. Napkin Head, for goodness sake!
The Mary-Kate and Ashley Widowed Dad Canon Inside a Canon
- It Takes Two: No two girls have ever been more motherless than Mary-Kate and Ashley during their prolific childhood on film, and it all started with their first big-screen feature, which followed the general two-lookalikes-meet-each-other-at-camp plot of The Parent Trap, except they’re never revealed to be related—one is an orphan, and one is the daughter of a widowed father, meaning three of their biological parents are dead. And I really don’t know if that’s more or less humane than splitting up two real twins. Either way, perfect use of the surname Butkis in this film, for the family that wants to adopt Mary-Kate to work in their salvage yard (not very girl dad).
- Billboard Dad: They go from parent-trapping to just graffiti-ing a billboard for their widowed dad in this one.
- New York Minute: You guessed it, dead mom. (Dads don’t die in Mary-Kate and Ashley films; ultimate girl dad behavior.)
- Not technically canon, but I feel like I have to mention that Mary-Kate and Ashley also had a dead mom and a single dad in the Girl Dad TV shows Full House and Two of a Kind. Cheers to Jarnette Olsen, their real mom, for never taking this trend personally.
Coming of Age, the Girl (Ranked from Most Likely to Make You Cry to Least Likely to Make You Cry)
My Girl
Even thinking of little Anna Chlumsky’s face as Vada—and subsequently, little Macaulay Culkin’s face as Thomas J, and then just as quickly (and this is as involuntary as yawning), Thomas J’s face without his glasses—can put a lump in my throat over 30 years after Dan Aykroyd entered the Girl Dad Movie Canon. Approach this one with whimsy, caution, and tissues.
Fly Away Home
There are baby geese and a baby Anna Paquin in this movie in which her character is grieving the loss of her mother and learning to trust a father she’s never known, who’s teaching her how to fly so she can teach the geese how to fly, because they imprinted on her. Based on a true girl dad story. Good luck!
King Richard
A true meditation on the singular focus of a girl dad who wants his daughters to be special in a world that’s determined to tell them they’re not. Will Smith went on to win an Oscar for his towering performance as Richard Williams in 2022, and that is absolutely all that happened at the 2022 Oscars.
Eighth Grade
You’re much more at risk of cringing to death from the harrowing relatability of Kayla navigating middle school in this movie, but the steady presence of her bumbling but fully devoted single dad is the reassurance Kayla—and we—need to keep from sinking beneath the surface of inevitable adolescent trauma.
Honorable Mention Girl Dads
There is an entire subcategory of “Coming of Age” movies with single, generally widowed girl dads that can’t technically be considered Girl Dad Movies because the girls are too busy finding their first romantic entanglements to pay much attention to their dads. But they are still girl dads to our heroines, and so we honor them for just how dad-like they can remain in the face of complete indifference:
- Mel Horowitz, Clueless: “What the hell is that?” “A dress.” “Says who?” “Calvin Klein!”
- Triton, The Little Mermaid: “Don’t you take that tone of voice with me, young lady! As long as you live under my ocean, you’ll obey my rules!”
- Jack, Pretty In Pink: “Since when is a daughter supposed to know more than her father? I’ve just been a blind fool.”
- Mr. Bennett, Pride & Prejudice (2005): “I cannot believe that anyone can deserve you … but it seems I am overruled. So, I heartily give my consent. I could not have parted with you, my Lizzy, to anyone less worthy.”
- Walter Stratford, Ten Things I Hate About You: A perfectly annoying teen rom-com dad, creating an impossible three-way tie for most apt quote between:
- “I’m down, I’ve got the 4-1-1, and you are not going out and getting jiggy with some boy, I don’t care how dope his ride is. My momma didn’t raise no foo’!”
- “Kissing, eh? That’s what you think happens? I’ve got news for you, kissing isn’t what keeps me up to my elbows in placenta all day long.”
- “I want you to wear the belly.”
- “I’m down, I’ve got the 4-1-1, and you are not going out and getting jiggy with some boy, I don’t care how dope his ride is. My momma didn’t raise no foo’!”
- “Kissing, eh? That’s what you think happens? I’ve got news for you, kissing isn’t what keeps me up to my elbows in placenta all day long.”
- “I want you to wear the belly.”
- “I’m down, I’ve got the 4-1-1, and you are not going out and getting jiggy with some boy, I don’t care how dope his ride is. My momma didn’t raise no foo’!”
- “Kissing, eh? That’s what you think happens? I’ve got news for you, kissing isn’t what keeps me up to my elbows in placenta all day long.”
- “I want you to wear the belly.”
Coming of Age, the Dad (Ranked from Sweet-Sad to Sad-Silly)
These movies about dads figuring it out still might make you cry—for your dad, and for your dad.
Aftersun
After Barbie in 2023, there was a real push to remember that all women were once girls, and that sometimes, we still feel the exact same feelings we did back then. From debut director Charlotte Wells, Aftersun is told through an adult daughter’s childhood memories of vacationing with her father when he was only 30 himself. It’s a girl dad story told delicately with subtle shifts in mood and perception, giving the impression that, for Calum and Sophie, this was an experience they knew would become a memory even as it was happening. Those rare moments when you’re truly aware of time, which almost always signify that it’s about to start moving differently. It’s a beautiful portrait of a daughter coming to better understand her father in retrospect, even when she was trying to understand him at the time, and he was trying his best to open himself up. A rare movie that captures the complex intimacies of the bond between a child and an adult, and how the dynamic is both locked in forever and capable of growing in complexity—in life and in memory.
Father of the Bride
Just thinking about Steve Martin’s crinkly eyes can make me well up, even though he’s a bona fide jackass for much of this movie. But the jackassery—as it so often is—is so wrapped up in care and love for another person that he can’t see how his concerns have turned ruinous. He’s so blinded by conviction that his daughter doesn’t know enough, even though she learned so much from him—and now she knows things he doesn’t, too. Now it’s time for them to care so much it hurts. All he can do is walk her down the aisle and trust her like he wants her to trust him. Oh Nancy Meyers, you can write a girl dad who gets so much wrong, but knows how to stick the landing when it counts.
Crazy, Stupid Love
Sometimes, a girl dad will cause a scene so embarrassing, so childish, so steeped in the belief that he knows better than everyone else, that he finally proves to himself and everyone else that he doesn’t. It won’t make anyone happier. It’ll just end with ice packs on some of our most revered modern actors.
If there’s one thing that One Battle really cements into the Girl Dad Movie Canon, it’s that no matter how old you are—and actually, especially as you get older—there is always more to learn. About yourself, the world, and the ones you love. Once a kid really starts to figure life out like you hoped they would, a girl dad might be faced with the inevitability that he still has just as much to learn as his child. And oftentimes from her. One Battle is the story of Bob’s marathon quest to just get to the end of the hero’s journey and find his daughter—only to discover that Willa’s already saved herself. And yet, even with all of her knowledge, and her strength, and her ability to save herself, she still desperately wants her dad to be there for her. To be there with her at the end, just on the other side of the road, calling out a cosmic tether: “It’s me, it’s your dad.” It’s a reminder that she is forever a part of something and someone. And maybe, in return for that ceaseless well of unconditional paternal love, Willa can help her dad learn how to use his iPhone.
Jodi Walker
Jodi covers pop culture, internet obsessions, and, occasionally, hot dogs. You can hear her on ‘We’re Obsessed,’ ‘The Morally Corrupt Bravo Show,’ and ‘The Prestige TV Podcast,’ and yelling into the void about daylight saving time.Source link
