“I have a purpose. If you think that it’s some kind of blessing, it’s not,” says Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mauser in Marty Supreme. “It means I have an obligation to see a very specific thing through.”
That very specific thing, for Marty, is the nearly impossible task of somehow pulling enough money out of thin air to pay his debts and fund his trip to compete in a ping-pong championship taking place in Japan. Ironically, Marty Supreme features very little actual ping pong. The majority of the movie is about one particularly audacious young man going to often comically absurd (and morally dubious) lengths to “achieve his dreams,” and more specifically, to somehow acquire the money to fund those dreams.
As singular as the premise of Marty Supreme may sound, it shares a common theme with many critically acclaimed films to come out in the past year.
Whether it was two Stephen King adaptations centered on men and boys throwing themselves into life-or-death competitions to make a fortune (The Long Walk and The Running Man), a Channing Tatum rom-dram and a Josh O’Connor indie about disaffected young fathers planning big heists in mundane places (Roofman and The Mastermind), stories about men on the frontier of a new civilization who sign up for high-risk high-reward jobs that may cost them their lives (Train Dreams and Mickey 17), a contemporary odyssey about a retired revolutionary throwing himself into an anarchic world of opposition just to find his daughter (One Battle After Another), a Korean psychological thriller about a recently fired family man who decides to concoct a murderous scheme to make sure he’s hired again (No Other Choice), a washed-up director trying to secure financing for his oddly autobiographical movie (Sentimental Value), or male entrepreneurs who seek to launch a risky new business venture despite being attacked by interested outsiders (Sinners and The Phoenician Scheme), these diverse 2025 movies all had one thing in common: disaffected men going to audacious, absurd, and often dangerous lengths to accomplish a singular task.
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Whenever common themes like this emerge in a given year of movies, I can only wonder what the artists and storytellers of our era are tapping into—intentionally or not—about the cultural moment. Sure, sometimes art can be merely a self-explanatory reflection of the world it exists within. But other times, it can be a profound prophetic witness to the unspoken groanings of an entire culture. The artists may not always know exactly what they’re doing or speaking about, but then, neither did the prophets throughout the Bible. And if God can speak through a donkey (Numbers 22), then surely God can speak through the stories our artists tell today.
Let’s imagine, then, that this widespread theme across many of 2025’s movies—a collection of stories about men going to wild lengths to accomplish something audacious—somehow speaks to something deeply resonant in American culture right now. What might these movies be communicating, consciously or not? What ideas do they echo, and what conclusions do they reach?
A World of Chaos
It’s worth starting with just how absurd many of these movies are. One of Marty Mauser’s schemes involves stealing a wealthy man’s dog and selling it back to him, but things quickly devolve into utter mayhem from there. Mickey 17 follows an off-beat man who is stuck dying again and again to help colonize a planet of aliens. Bob Ferguson in One Battle After Another spends most of the movie coming close to death while lighting up blunts in a bathrobe, opposed by a shadowy secret society of white nationalists who worship Saint Nicholas. In quite a few of these films, there are the best laid plans (or plots), and then there are the ways that they quickly spiral into chaos and insanity. And I think something about the frenetic, frenzied, unceasing worlds these movies construct taps into what the political reality in America feels like right now.
Money and Muddled Motivations
But absurdity isn’t the only common factor—another one is the pursuit of money.
Whether the robbery-based escapades of Marty Supreme, Roofman, and The Mastermind, the business ventures of Sinners and Phoenician Scheme, or the reality shows and life-threatening vocations of The Running Man, The Long Walk, and Mickey 17—part of what makes these characters audacious is both the fortune they seek and their method of attaining it. Very few of these schemes to make a quick buck are morally upstanding; most of them involve some kind of deception or danger.
And it almost goes without saying why Americans might resonate with stories about “securing the bag.” Money is an important issue for Americans right now, as it has been for a while. The economy and affordability were far and away the deciding talking points of the 2024 election, and for many, that financial stress has not eased. Perhaps, in some way, many people feel as though they’ve willfully placed themselves into an absurd and morally dubious situation (say, voting once again for a convicted felon and known liar) because they believed that they might stand to gain financially.
It almost goes without saying why Americans might resonate with stories about “securing the bag.”
What many of the men in these 2025 movies find, though, is that there are the reasons that they say they are doing something, and then there are the deeper—and often, more selfish—reasons that eventually bubble to the surface. Noble outlaw fantasies, dreams of athletic success, revenge, and comeuppance—these all hide behind the seemingly simple quest for money in many of these stories. Often, these men’s audacious actions all mask deeper feelings of inadequacy.
Parental Presence and Absence
And it gets more specific than that: strikingly, nearly all of these male characters feel particularly like inadequate fathers.
One Battle After Another, Roofman, The Running Man, Marty Supreme, Train Dreams, Sentimental Value, No Other Choice, and The Phoenician Scheme all prominently feature fathers trying desperately to help their children—and coming up short. And heists, schemes, elaborate movie pitches, and reality TV competitions all represent the quest to provide for family in an absurd, life-threatening, or morally misguided way.
In the Oscar-nominated film Sentimental Value, Stellan Skarsgård portrays Gustav Borg, a famous director and absent father. When he dramatically returns to his adult daughters’ lives, he tells them, “You two are the best thing that ever happened to me.” The elder daughter Nora, responds, “The best that’s happened to you? Then why weren’t you there?”
Nora’s disappointment in her father’s absence—despite his grand intentions—resonates throughout many of these movies. What Nora needed was not provisions or wealth, or a movie written for her. She needed a father who could offer her sustained presence and integrity.
I can imagine that this same emotion has been keenly felt by many among the younger generation in the U.S. who have watched their parents repeatedly vote for President Donald Trump under the guise of “helping the economy,” a choice that has led to increasing relational distance. In electing a conman to ostensibly save their bank accounts, maybe they (and the nation) entered a world of absurdity and lost their souls.
If I take anything in particular from these films about what the U.S. might need to hear right now, it’s that we need to reexamine the muddy motivations that got us into a world of chaotic absurdity, realize that the pursuit of money alone might be compromising our conscience, and ask how we can be more present for the people who actually need us: our children. Children, after all, are the ones being formed most by the tumultuous world we have created for them.
For people of faith, whether parents or not, one of our greatest comforts should be that we don’t have to provide alone. Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” (Matthew 6:26).
If there is anyone who embarked into an absurd and chaotic world—risking life and limb—to provide for their children, it is God in the incarnation. And that is a profound comfort: It means we don’t need to do the same thing ourselves. All we must do is exist in God’s loving arms and extend our image of those arms to the others in our own care.
Like many of these movies, from One Battle to Sinners, Marty Supreme also culminates with that crucial parental presence finally taking precedence over schemes and ambitions. After an entire film spent avoiding the fact that his lover Rachel’s baby is almost certainly his child, Marty returns to the U.S. from his competition—having won, but thrown away most of his future career prospects—and walks straight into the hospital telling the nurse assertively, “I’m the father.” He sits with Rachel and comforts her without asking or trying to do anything more than be there. And then he finally meets his newborn son and breaks down into tears for the first time. Maybe what all children need is not a father sacrificing his moral fiber to provide or succeed, but a parent who can tend to them with integrity, without being consumed by the chaotic and absurd. That’s certainly what God did, and continues to do, for us.
Georgia Coley is a documentary filmmaker and culture writer living in Nashville. She writes about the intersection of trans experience and theology at her Substack, Georgia In Her Mind.
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