The new teaser for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another starts with an arresting visual, and noise: a long-haired Leonardo DiCaprio, nursing a beer, is jolted by a pregnant woman firing round after round from an automatic weapon.

Later, her child is born. “What are you gonna do about this baby?” someone asks.

We soon see another woman — the grown-up baby? — firing a similar weapon. She’s played by Chase Infiniti, and before long she’s in the clutches of the film’s villain, played by Sean Penn. And we hear some typically jarring music from Anderson’s longtime collaborator, Jonny Greenwood.

The rest is up to you to decipher. But don’t worry — this is just the teaser for One Battle After Another, kind of a trailer for a trailer. The real trailer will come next week.

Background on One Battle After Another, Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

One Battle After Another pairs Anderson with DiCaprio for the first time, and reunites him with Penn, who had a notable appearance in Anderson’s last film, 2021’s Licorice Pizza.

Besides DiCaprio, Penn, and Infiniti, the new film stars Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Wood Harris, as well as Benicio Del Toro, a veteran of Anderson’s 2014 Infinite Vice, and Licorice Pizza star Alana Haim. It was filmed in locations including Sacramento, California and El Paso, Texas.

One Battle After Another arrives in theaters September 26.

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It’s the second Anderson film to be based on a Thomas Pynchon novel. The reclusive author also wrote the 2009 novel that inspired Inherent Vice, which starred Joaquin Phoenix as a stoner detective.

One Battle After Another is inspired by Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, set in 1984, which follows 1960s rebels who are tracked down by a relentless federal prosecutor.

The new film seems to take considerable liberties with the source material — it’s set in the modern day, not the 1980s.

The Wall Street Journal reported in August that the Warner Bros. film is budgeted at $140 million, with DiCaprio earning a $20 million salary.

That figure has earned some headlines, because Anderson’s top-grossing film so far, There Will Be Blood, took in $76 million at the box office. 

But the higher budget for One Battle After Another has been justified by DiCaprio’s involvement — he remains one of few truly bankable movie stars – and the prestige associated with directing a PT Anderson film.

You can’t put a price, the logic goes, on releasing a new film from the director of Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread.

Main image: One Battle After Another, by Paul Thomas Anderson. Warner Bros.