‘One Battle After Another,’ ‘Marty Supreme’ and ‘Sirāt’ Explore New Dimensions of On-Screen Fatherhood

In the new film “Sirāt,” opening Feb. 6, a father is on a quest. Luis’ daughter has gone missing at a rave in Morocco; Luis (Sergi López), accompanied by his young son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), has traveled from afar to find her. Anyone familiar with the origin of the film’s title — an Arabic word referring to the vanishingly thin path between heaven and hell — can predict that not everything goes according to plan.

Much has been written about the on-screen mothers of the past year in cinema: From “Die My Love” to “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” to “Hamnet,” several movies have made great actresses suffer violently to convey big and carefully thought-through ideas about the challenges of intimately loving a being you carried to term. Luis represents another perspective on parenthood: As his search continues and he encounters horrifying obstacles, Luis feels increasingly lost in every sense. The characters played by Jennifer Lawrence, Rose Byrne and Jessie Buckley in the above films feel violently close to their children. Motherhood is central to their identities. By contrast, Luis, as time passes, becomes alienated from his sense of himself as a father.

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This places him within an interesting circle of fellow dads. The fathers of 2025 movies tended toward the uncertain, the flailing and the lost. In “One Battle After Another,” Leonardo DiCaprio’s character is continually hit with waves of shame at his ineptitude after he fails to keep his daughter safe. (He didn’t, he weeps, even know how to comb her hair — what kind of father was he?) In “No Other Choice,” Lee Byung-hun plays a man who goes to increasingly lethal and desperate measures to provide for his kids; he sees no other way, as it were, to keep them housed and fed. “Sentimental Value” casts Stellan Skarsgård as a writer-director father who attempts to use his art, late in life, to forge a connection with his children that his words and deeds cannot. And in “Marty Supreme,” Timothée Chalamet plays a young New Yorker who, aware on the fringes of his consciousness that he’s about to become a father, races around the city and the world to keep himself focused on anything else. To face up to his responsibilities seems unbearably daunting.

Motherhood and fatherhood both come with fairly heady cultural expectations. And while this year’s bad moms break out of what’s proscribed for them with shattering, ferocious brio, the bad dads — such as they are — suffer in a more muted way. Just about the only element of “Sirāt,” which was widely mentioned across the Oscar-nominations shortlists, that’s gone under-discussed is López’s performance. What makes the movie work is Luis, in still moments, turning over in his mind all the failures that brought him to this point. López allows us to see this painful process of recrimination.

Crucially, we don’t know what, exactly, his mistakes were, just as we don’t see the time Bob Ferguson spent raising his daughter in “One Battle After Another” and we only allusively learn of Gustav Borg’s crummy parenting in “Sentimental Value.” We know that Luis has a daughter who left home and went missing, and we see that his need to find her isn’t just about the urgent desire to make sure she’s safe; it’s a chance for his own redemption. He believes himself to be unfit. Locating his daughter might disprove that.

There’s one more key difference between the motherhood and fatherhood movies of the past year. All three big movies about moms in crisis have the home at their center, and venture beyond it only briefly (and, in the case of “Hamnet”’s final scene, powerfully). The dads of 2025, whether they’re navigating the contemporary job market, the film industry or the aftermath of a rave, are all out there in the wider world. All of them, too, seem to take from their experiences the lesson that it is next to impossible to keep your children safe — but in the attempt, you might discover you’re capable of more than you believed possible.