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When we watch the news now, we often ask ourselves: what disaster movie is this? Is it the one where Americans are shot in their cars and on the street, where manicurists and gardeners are hauled off to torture prisons overseas, and where the commander-in-chief pronounces “affordability” like it’s some weird German word. But the inverse is true as well. As American reality has begun to feel like the Hollywood film Civil War, 2025’s Oscar-nominated movies almost all—for the first time in decades—reflect our insecure, tormented reality. But these films do more than echo the bare facts. While they’re about economic and social insecurity, authoritarianism and exploitation, they all represent those forces through the uncanny and surreal.
Take Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, a hyperreal, pulpy and sometimes dreamlike portrait of American political violence. In the film’s most memorable sequence, Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) aids migrants as they escape the authorities in what he calls a “Latino Harriet Tubman situation:” his allies ride skateboards and jump from roof to roof as if they were samizdat chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins.
The radicals dubbed the French 75, who take on the film’s ICE-inflected police state, get quasi-Pynchonian, performative names like Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills: their backstory is rendered in commensurately broad strokes, set against backdrops like a desert weed farm-slash-nunnery. As a daughter of Weather Underground members recently wrote in the New York Times, One Battle After Another’s resistance fighters are cartoons of the real McCoy, emanations of an improbable, fantastical style.
These films exemplify “hysterical surrealism,” a genre that fits our age of Trump, erratic state violence, and opulent overlords who treat our country like their private bunker.
In Sinners, Jim Crow-era Black American musicians and entrepreneurs strive for independent spaces for love and commerce, and are robbed of their lives and livelihoods by an Irish vampire with potato famine vibes. Timeframes may meld wildly—the film’s central 1930s Mississippi juke joint dance number includes contemporary hip hop dancers and Cleopatra. Director Ryan Coogler has said that he intended the film as about how Black music, a “system of healing,” was extracted for profit. (It’s a happy paradox that a film so critical of exploitative and racist capitalism has grossed more than 370 million dollars.)
These films exemplify what I’ve called “hysterical surrealism,” a genre that fits our age of Trump, erratic state violence, and opulent overlords who treat our country like their private bunker.
Representing social insecurity and precarity in something like a magical realist fashion lets audiences more comfortably watch films that speak to their own anxieties as viewers. Surrealism emerged, after all, as an art genre that was both a reprieve from and reflection of the violent political situation of World War I. After all that grotesque slaughter, who could believe in conventional representational art anymore?
As surrealism partly relieved viewers of that unease—while also capturing new levels of brutality through unexpected symbols—so does the aesthetic of this new crop of films permit viewers to process the extreme social insecurity of our period by portraying aggression and loss in ways that feel detached from the everyday.
In the Brazilian-made Best Picture nominee The Secret Agent, set in that country’s authoritarian 1970s, a pungent sequence features an animated amputated leg, acting as a surreal “stand-in” for police state violence, harming citizens in the film as if it were a slasher. The leg refers to the perna cabeluda (hairy leg), a real-life urban legend from the city of Recife: a severed limb was reputed to hop around dark boulevards kicking people, a metaphor for the dictatorship.
A fourth Best Picture nominee, the sci-fi thriller Bugonia, is also stridently weird, obsessed with both close-ups of bees and the threat of a global conspiracy. So is Marty Supreme, ostensibly a 1950s period drama but with a hyperreal, dislocating aesthetic, full of contemporary-feeling dialogue and editing so rapid that it induces seasickness.
Timothée Chalamet as Marty is a tenement-dwelling, nervy capitalist in the making, hustling ping-pong tables and international table tennis competitions, but he’s also a hyperkinetic liar, careening through every layer of the American social structure: in one scene, he crashes through the floor of a hotel room while taking a bath, landing on a gangster. Marty’s status anxiety and empty ambition is represented, in another scene, by an extended shot of hundreds of ping-pong balls descending on a nighttime New York City street.
Beyond exposing viewers to a stylized and thus less paralyzing version of their fears, today’s gritty, surreal mode of filmmaking genuinely captures our moment. The wild uncertainty and cartoonish oppression of our current moment is best rendered in a weird and confrontational register. Charlie Kirk was shot by a kid who etched Discord memes on the bullets, and everyone saw the footage. DHS now routinely releases white supremacist supercuts of police violence that look like grist for Adam Curtis documentaries. We dwell, after all, in a weird and violent world where it seems that anything bad can happen and often does.
These films’ uncanny aesthetic gives the viewer some blessed distance from police state oppression or social class desperation, even when they mirror the prevailing tensions of our own reality.
These films stand in contrast to the realist 1970s “social issue films,” the last time politically charged films dominated the typically all-too-conventional film award ceremonies. Those 1970s ancestors of today’s Oscar-lauded films, like Academy Award-winners Rocky and Norma Rae, or The King of Marvin Gardens, were schmaltzily realist and transparent in comparison. Rocky‘s working-class uneducated boxer is a debt collector struggling to get his piece of the American Dream during the economic crisis of the 1970s.
In 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, widowed Alice, who dreams of life as a singer, becomes a waitress in the Southwest to support her child. In Blue Collar, made four years later, Detroit autoworkers including a brilliant Richard Pryor try to keep the faith when their jobs are dull and grim. These films emerged in a time when the postwar promise of working- and middle-class security and income growth started to fracture. (The Nixonian, uncanny political edge of the 1970s was, in contrast, represented in paranoiac—but still more or less realist—thrillers like The Parallax View.)
This year’s Oscar-nominated films about ambitious strivers, faded revolutionaries, and exploited workers, in contrast, are far from realistic. Their hysterical surrealism—a screwball, otherworldly style that seeks to represent inequality and authoritarianism through wacky B-movie elements, pastiche, and anachronism—has antecedents in Best Picture winner Bong Joon Ho’s at times surreal class-struggle film Parasite. All are defined by what the scholars Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho and John Schoneboom have dubbed “surrealpolitik,” an aesthetic expressing a world “increasingly shaped by irrationality, disruption, and the erosion of established norms.”
“Surrealpolitik,” in the words of de Carvalho, is what happens when both culture and politics resemble a “fantasy island: one with little room for rules…and little concern for logical coherence.” If surrealpolitik shapes this year’s Oscar fare, it’s partly because “realism”—surrealism’s opposite—is now so tenuous. AI and other visual tricks have made it hard for us to know what’s factual footage and if it is of an actual event. So little unedited footage gets to us. Meanwhile, every state and politician is a purveyor of some kind of “content,” often similarly distorted, but coming to us with the imprimatur of some supposedly respectable platform or other. Conventional realism, in this context, feels fake.
These films’ uncanny aesthetic gives the viewer some blessed distance from police state oppression or social class desperation, even when they mirror the prevailing tensions of our own reality. Call it Extractive Capitalism for Dummies.
This weekend, when tens of millions watch the Oscars, viewers will be seeing something different from what we’ve seen in decades: a competition between surreal and hyperreal films about societal and economic instability, for the first time in decades, if ever.
Sure, I’ll be tuning in to enjoy terrible canned banter and over-the-top production numbers, and to hope that someone finally rewards long-deserving Gen X patron saint Ethan Hawke. But I’ll also be waiting for a star or a filmmaker, after thanking their twenty agents, to suggest taxing the rich and that every billionaire is a policy failure, starting with those in the award’s show audience.
They will, after all, have the hugest stage in which to note that America has now become even sicklier and more surreal than the films that have been nominated. They could voice their own critique of the world their films reflect. It’s doubtful that they will, of course, but here’s hoping.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.