By Robert Scucci
| Published 31 seconds ago

After watching 2021’s Kate, the almighty algorithm threw 2022’s The Gray Man onto my radar, and I can’t say Ryan Gosling has ever disappointed me, so I figured I may as well give it a shot. He has a built-in level of charisma that lets him do his thing, and most of the time it lands. Going into the Russo brothers’ film expecting to see $200 million well spent on action sequences, with the added bonus of Gosling in the mix, I didn’t quite know how things would play out, but I had a hunch I wouldn’t feel let down.

But here’s the problem with straight-to-streaming action thrillers. Films like The Gray Man never get much time on the big screen, and they kind of need it if you want to enjoy them at the highest level. Across roughly 400 theaters, the film only brought in $454,023, which isn’t really its fault. It had a very short run across a disproportionately small number of screens, meaning it was never meant to recoup its budget this way. It’s a Netflix Original, designed to pull huge numbers on streaming.

The reason I see this as a bad thing is because this is an expensive movie. MCU expensive. Waterworld expensive. When that much money goes into blowing stuff up in spectacular fashion, I want to see it on a giant screen. Living in an apartment, I don’t have a fancy audio setup because my neighbors would murder me if I did, and my 44-inch TV is fine for most things, but less than stellar when entire city squares are getting leveled with all guns blazing.

Long story short, The Gray Man is a lot of fun, but it would be even more fun if you could watch it the way it was meant to be seen.

Let’s Not Get Bogged Down By The Details

The Gray Man also has an extremely convoluted plot. Not in a “too many twists” kind of way, but it’s a “load up the guns, spray and pray” kind of movie that would have been better served by simplicity. It’s executed well, but as side characters keep getting introduced in the second and third acts, part of me gets annoyed that I can’t fully shut my brain off because there’s always a new name or face to keep track of after the blasting has already started.

Ryan Gosling is a black ops agent known as Sierra Six, formerly Courtland Gentry. He was locked up as a minor after murdering his abusive father, and CIA officer Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton) decides he’s the perfect candidate for a second chance. The deal is simple: Courtland works for him in exchange for his freedom, knowing he’ll be dealing with some very dangerous people.

Once things get rolling, Sierra Six teams up with Agent Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas), and the first mission we see involves assassinating a target named Dining Car (Callan Mulvey). Complications arise when the job goes sideways and Dining Car reveals he’s also part of the Sierra program before succumbing to his wounds. A flash drive gets passed off with vague instructions, and the wild goose chase begins, centering on CIA officer Denny Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page), who sends a swarm of operatives after Six and Dani to retrieve it.

Along the way, we get more backstory on Six’s relationship with Donald and his niece Claire (Julia Butters), who Six previously worked security detail for. This obviously becomes important later because more collateral has entered the equation. The scenes between Six and Claire offer a surprisingly wholesome break from the chaos in Prague, and they’re a welcome addition.

From here on out, you pretty much know the deal. Double crosses stack on top of double crosses, things explode, and there’s so much inter-agency confusion over who’s good and who’s pulling the strings that you almost wish they’d ease up on the exposition and just keep blowing stuff up.

Solid, Pulse Pounding Action Thriller

The Gray Man’s budget absolutely shows on screen from start to finish. The action sequences are gorgeously shot (something that’s not always consistent across Netflix Originals), and at one point Sierra Six is standing on top of a moving tram, firing through the roof while tracking targets through reflections in nearby windows as the city flies past. This comes after he’s handcuffed to a railing in a town square, picking off attackers before they even get a chance to take him out.

Ana de Armas wielding a shotgun after throwing hands is also worth your time because she fully commits when the moment calls for it.

The only real issue I have is the film’s tendency to overload its premise with complexity for the sake of it. Most people don’t turn on action thrillers to do mental gymnastics. At least I don’t. I love psychological thrillers when I want things to get murky, but with action movies, I just want to sit back and watch things explode.

The convoluted plot isn’t a dealbreaker, just a nitpick. Some people enjoy sprawling shadow government conspiracies. It’s just not really my thing, so take that with a grain of salt. It’s still a great watch, just not one you can fully sink into the couch for and completely turn your brain off.

The Gray Man is a Netflix Original, and you can stream it with an active subscription.

By Joshua Tyler
| Updated 41 seconds ago

People don’t just want to belong, they need to. Rejection isn’t treated by the brain as a metaphorical pain; it registers the same way as physical harm. That means people will do almost anything to make sure they belong. However, belonging isn’t strengthened by agreement; it’s strengthened by what you’re willing to ignore to stay aligned.

The power to make someone ignore what’s being done to them may be the most powerful persuasion technique of all. It was used in the biggest, most awarded movie of 2025, and no one seemed to notice. They couldn’t notice, because noticing comes with a cost. Once you decide not to notice, you’re owned. Instead, they gave it Oscars and pretended everything was normal and fine, though deep down, it’s likely everyone watching knew it wasn’t. 

This is the story of how One Battle After Another screenwashed believers into becoming zealots, all to belong.

A Script Made Up Of Words Shouted At A Federal Building

One Battle After Another was directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, the genius auteur behind movies like There Will Be Blood and Boogie Nights. It’s loosely based on a 1990 novel called Vineland. 

The movie itself centers on Bob Ferguson, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, a washed-up former revolutionary from the terrorist militant group French 75. He lives off-grid in stoned paranoia, raising his spirited, and often totally disrespectful and rude, teenage daughter, Willa.

Sixteen years after participating in a terrorist attack on a U.S.-Mexico border detention center, his old enemy, Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn, resurfaces, forcing Bob and Willa to run.

That’s the story on paper, but nothing on screen ever feels that cohesive. Early on, the dialogue consists mostly of words that sound like they were shouted at a Federal building. Later, it devolves into cursing and guttural sounds. There’s a lot of driving back and forth in cars, and time spent breathing heavily in filthy places with filthy people.

One Battle After Another Is Setting A Trap, For The Audience

The movie might sound unappealing, and it is, but it’s also on purpose because One Battle After Another is not out to tell a compelling story; it’s setting a trap. A Reflexive Manipulation Trap. 

A reflexive manipulation trap is a persuasion tactic in which a message is made obviously manipulative, on purpose, in order to create pressure on the audience to deny or overlook that manipulation. By accepting the message anyway, the audience participates in maintaining the illusion, which increases their psychological commitment to it. 

It’s like becoming an accessory to murder. Once you’ve participated in the crime, you’ll do anything to hide the body. 

Creating that kind of mental trap is deep and complex, and it exists for only one, very specific purpose. More on what that is as we unravel this thread. 

How To Create A Reflexive Manipulation Trap

Here’s how One Battle After Another executes its Reflexive Manipulation trap, step by step.

Before a would-be persuader can execute a Reflexive Manipulation Trap, they have to pick a specific audience. Usually, the best movies and indeed the best art is designed to tap into something universal and primal. For this to work, you must do the opposite and go after one group. For instance, if you were going after dog lovers, you’d probably start your story off by showing your hero rescuing a dog.

One Battle After Another is intended only for people who exist on the most left-wing end of the political spectrum. That’s why you’ve seen the Hollywood elite slobbering over the movie like it’s the biggest thing ever, but have likely heard virtually nothing about it from your average, non-political friends. 

So One Battle After Another opens with a scene involving a heroic raid on an illegal immigrant detention center. According to most polling, nearly 80% of people are in favor of detaining illegal immigrants. So 80% of viewers will be turned off by this movie from the jump.

It’s all on purpose as One Battle immediately launches into speeches extolling the virtues of open borders, and then enforces that view at the point of a gun. It’s on purpose because it’s intentionally only courting the remaing 20% of the audience that agrees with these views, and in doing so, it tells them explicitly that this movie is for you and your group, right off the bat. 

Moral authority established. I’m one of you. 

Now that your audience knows who the good people are, you must make one of those good people do something wrong. Something evil.

Over the course of the movie’s first half hour, one of our chief protagonists is a terrorist leader, a black woman whose actual name is Perfidia Beverly Hills. She’s violent, overbearing, and totally dedicated to the cause.

That might sound off-putting, but remember, you can’t look at this movie through a lens of what would appeal to you or anyone in the 80%. You must look at it through the lens of what would appeal to that 20%. And for that 20%, she checks all the boxes to be their ideal woman. She’s perfect.

Perfidia soon becomes pregnant. She immediately abandons her newborn infant for what she describes as “the revolution” while proclaiming that no one can take her power.

By any normal moral standard, a mother abandoning a newborn is one of the worst things someone can do. It’s flat-out evil.

Yet the person doing it is the character most ideologically aligned with the film’s target audience. Their ideal woman. And while she’s out of the story for most of the film after this, up until this point, she’s been framed as the movie’s main hero.

When Perfidia announces that she’s choosing herself over her newborn, the man who thinks he’s her father, DiCaprio’s Bob character, could object. Instead, he mutters some vague things about family before announcing “you go, girl” and sending her on her way to abandon her child.

Later, Perfidia is condemned for other reasons, but no one objects to this mother abandoning her baby daughter. At all. 

Squirming in their seats, the audience can’t object either. From the 20%’s point of view, the woman committing this evil is part of a protected class and also ideologically aligned with them. She’s their group’s spirit animal, and they know it. 

Even more critically, she specifically cites their mutual ideology as the reason for her sick, selfish abandonment of her baby. For someone in that 20%, in order to condemn Perfidia’s action, they’d have to mentally challenge everything they believe in.

Leo’s Bob character has now been left to care for a newborn, who isn’t even really his daughter, on his own. This should be difficult and traumatic, but One Battle After Another dodges those consequences by flashing forward to a future where the baby’s grown and everything worked out just fine. 

Hand wave, it didn’t matter. See, it’s easy to accept, fellow group member!

The abandonment of Perfidia’s daughter is the inciting incident for the entire film. Everything that happens after hinges on it.

If you reject this incident as repugnant, you must reject the entire movie. If you reject the movie, you reject its ideology. If you reject that ideology, you no longer belong to the group that the movie has established itself as representing. Your group, the group you’ve built your entire identity around.

Or you can decide it’s fine for a mother to abandon an infant in the name of black power. You must choose.

To make the effect stick, you must lock in the viewer’s acceptance of evil with a reward. In this case that reward is zealot porn.

Zealot porn is a short-cut term I coined, which refers to content intentionally crafted to gratify moral superiority, deliver cathartic satisfaction, and lock in beliefs deeper through confirmation bias. Often this is done through the portrayal of extreme violence, which would otherwise be unacceptable.

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds is an early example of zealot porn, an entire movie crafted for the purpose of giving audience members the pleasure of watching Nazis burn.

Another recent example is the television series, Peacemaker. The show’s second season creates a plot around the idea of giving its audience pleasure by watching people it labels as evil suffer. 

One Battle After Another spends most of its run time delivering dopamine hits to its 20% through tormenting its ideological opponents. The movie kills its white male villain twice, for no real reason other than it enjoys watching him die. After the second time, the camera follows along as workers dispose of his carcass, so the audience can revel in watching his carcass burn. 

That’s zealot porn. Catharsis is delivered, and the audience is rewarded for belonging. 

Now, One Battle After Another’s viewers are fully complicit in what it’s doing, and to justify their decision to comply with its agenda, they’ll do anything. Even give it six Oscars. 

Solidifying Support After You’ve Won The Propaganda War

One Battle After Another is what it looks like when you’ve won the propaganda battle and the time for persuasion is over. One Battle After Another is what it looks like when you stop convincing and start solidifying. And that’s exactly what it’s doing.

What people call psychological programming or brainwashing is usually a stack of learned associations, emotions tied to symbols, stories tied to identity, reactions tied to cues. Those associations only hold as long as they’re being refreshed. Remove the reinforcement, and the system starts to unwind over time.

It’s why cult deprogramming usually revolves around simply getting the victim away from the cult. Separate them from constant reinforcement of the message, and the programming fades on its own.

That means that once a malign force has someone under its control, it has to keep putting in work to keep them there. But it can’t keep doing what it did before, continuing to persuade someone to your point of view after you’ve already convinced them, often backfires, and turns them against you.

That’s where a Reflexive Manipulation Trap becomes useful. It won’t persuade new people over to your side, but it does ensure that none of your existing followers stray. It does this by making them lie to themselves. It does so by making them complicit in a crime or moral wrongdoing. 

Once Someone Lies To Themselves, They Keep Lying To Cover Up The First Lie

Unlike other forms of persuasion, which lose efficacy the more frequently they’re used, you can keep setting traps like this one over and over again. So that’s exactly what One Battle After Another does.

That first trap, revolving around Perfidia abandoning her child, is the setup for a series of obvious manipulations and overt propagandistic moments. Having already lied to themselves to get through the first one, the audience keeps lying through all of them.

It’s why One Battle After Another is visually uninspired. It’s why the plot is meandering and disjointed. It’s why the characters are largely cartoony and ridiculous. Even their names are idiotic. The main villain’s name is literally Colonel Lockjaw.

Every one of these narrative and moral affronts in the film must be accepted by the audience as a work of genius because of the trap, and every one they accept binds them closer and closer to the group the movie is targeting. Everyone who walked out of One Battle After Another became, in one way or another, a more zealous member of that 20% than they were when they walked in. 

Bind them close enough, make them complicit enough, and there’s no limit to what they’ll do to make sure they continue belonging. Some day we’ll say it all started, because One Battle After Another laid a trap.

Congratulations, loyal zealots, you’ve been Screenwashed.

Table of Contents

Robot vacuum releases for 2026 kicked off in February and have been relentless since. Compared to multiple pre-spring release dates, Narwal’s April 13 launch of the Narwal Flow 2 feels a little behind. A new roller mop robot entering the fold at this point would need to have a little extra sparkle to stand out — to the average buyer, and to me, a vacuum reviewer who has had at least three robot vacuum and mop combos under her roof at any given point since January.

The roller mop is more flat and rectangular than most cylindrical ones.
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable

The Flow 2 comes with detergent that auto-dispenses into the water tank.
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable

What’s special about the Narwal Flow 2?

Seemingly nothing, if you were merely comparing the bullet points in the Flow 2’s Amazon description to the Amazon listings for other robovacs in its price range. 31,000 Pa suction power? A self-cleaning roller mop? Dual camera AI object recognition? On paper, it’s nothing we haven’t heard before. In practice, though, the Narwal Flow 2’s AI skills around obstacles and messes have proven more reliable than other 2026 flagships that claim the same thing.

I’ve realized that the Flow 2’s specs are actually loaded for how much Narwal is charging — especially with the Flow 2 at its launch sale price of $1,099.99. 31,000 Pa suction is quite strong for barely costing over $1,000, and heated water mopping is hard to come across at all. The Dreamxe X60 Max Ultra Complete mops with hot water, too, but it’s not a roller mop vacuum (and it costs more).

The Narwal Flow 2 might have the best AI mess detection I’ve seen

Every big robot vacuum is flaunting AI-powered cleaning and obstacle recognition this year. The thing is, AI robot vacuum features mean nothing to me if they’re dodgy. Most fancy AI robot vacuums I’ve tested recently seem to struggle with consistent mess detection, especially around liquid. The Narwal Flow 2 and its Freo Mind AI mode have been different, though.

When Narwal says that the Flow 2 “sees everything,” it’s honestly not that much of a stretch. When upcoming piles of debris or liquid spills are substantial enough, the Flow 2’s front-facing camera snaps a picture before adjusting its cleaning approach accordingly. For instance, the Flow 2 knew that tracked kitty litter around the Litter-Robot was “scattered debris.” Suction power audibly boosts when the Flow 2 crosses any area it thinks is heavily soiled.

Every robot vacuum I review has to take the Litter-Robot area test.
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable

The Flow 2 identified the field of dry scattered debris (and got Sansa in the picture).
Credit: Screenshot / Narwal

Most AI robot vacs use live imaging like this for behind-the-scenes processing while cleaning, but photographic evidence of what the vacuum is seeing isn’t always readily available. I appreciate that the Flow 2 is so transparent about its thought process — it’s been fun to make a mess on the floor, then immediately check the app to see if the Flow 2 accurately recognized it.

Narwal’s small obstacle avoidance has also been spot-on so far. The Flow 2 successfully avoids charging cords, shoes, and slippers on a daily basis, and even made it a point to steer around large clumps of potting soil (thinking they were pet waste). The app drops a little pin in the map, noting what type of obstacle it found, and you can see a photo of those, too. This is how I found out that the Flow 2 noticed more niche obstacles in its peripherals, like the very out-of-the-way power cord to my Mill food recycling bin and my cat’s crinkle ball toys.

Is the Narwal Flow 2 good at mopping?

The Narwal Flow 2 is a beast at soaking up liquid spills. Instead of the traditional cylindrical roller mop design, this roller has flat slides like a conveyor belt. Narwal says this covers 0.157 square feet of floor surface per pass, which is allegedly more direct surface coverage than the sliver of a rounded roller mop hitting the floor at any given point. I believe that. The Flow 2 was super effective at fully soaking up runny spills like wine and thicker droplet consistencies like ranch and pancake batter.

The Flow 2 zeroed in on the wine and navigated around it more carefully.
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable

It took forever, but the Flow 2 did end up leaving the area spotless.
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable

Most notably, the Flow 2 left no sticky residue behind after mopping several drops of syrup — and every robot vacuum struggles to fully wipe syrup up. This has to be due to the roller mop’s use of heated water, which we rarely see in roller mop robot vacuums. The combination of heat with a pressurized flat roller seems to be an elite pairing for melting away caked-on grime.

I realize that 140 degrees Fahrenheit isn’t enough to kill bacteria by science’s standards. But for me, the heated scrubbing provides an extra layer of sanitation (and subsequently, comfort) for walking around in bare feet.

Is the Narwal Flow 2 good at vacuuming?

The Narwal Flow 2’s rug cleaning is definitely in the top percentile of the many flagship robot vacuums I’ve tested since January. I’d unsurprisingly rank it just below the Dreame X60 Max Ultra Complete’s 35,000 Pa, but would surprisingly rank it above the Roborock Saros 20‘s 36,000 Pa. If you just want to compare the suction power to other roller mop robot vacuums, the Flow 2 is a smidge better than the Roborock Qrevo Curv 2 Flow‘s 20,000 Pa.

There’s a lot of variety in the Narwal app’s customized vacuuming settings. There are four suction options from “quiet” to “super powerful,” plus the occasional pop-up option for “vortex suction,” depending on the floor type. You can choose between a standard or meticulous route, the latter taking longer as the Flow 2 scrupulously cleans in two zigzag patterns, one running perpendicular to the first to create a crosshatch pattern. My favorite part is being able to choose up to THREE cleaning passes for extra good measure.

I entrusted the Flow 2 with tackling daily rug buildup like shedded cat hair and long head hairs from my own personal shedding, small crumbs, and litter lodged in the fibers of my plush bath mats. All of those saw a 95 to 97 percent pickup rate. After recently watching the Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai miss a ton of tiny quinoa pieces that I dumped into the fluffy hallway rug, I experimented with the Flow 2’s handling of the same exact mess. It went much better this time.

From sticky water bowl stains to flung food, the Flow 2 always excels in the cat bowl area.
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable

If the Flow 2 missed any cat food on the first pass, it always grabs it on the second or third.
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable

The Flow 2’s performance on hardwood and tile has been solid, too. I was constantly sending it to clean up kibble and crusted wet food flung from my cats’ bowls, fallen dryer lint, and two types of cat litter. None of the missed debris or dust here and there has been egregious, confirmed by the laser on one of my Dyson stick vacuums. Not even a minuscule stem was left behind after the Flow took several passes over dried bouquet remnants that my cat knocked out of a vase.

Factors to keep in mind

As helpful as the meticulous cleaning and navigational settings have been, they’re sometimes granular to the point of being more complicated than they need to be.

The Narwal refused to go near the wine just because of the setting it was on.
Credit: Screenshot / Narwal

Narwal’s cleaning settings were… hyper-vigilant when I wanted the Flow 2 to clean up a puddle of wine. No matter how many times I sent it to vacuum and mop this cleaning zone, the Flow 2 would clean the entire rectangle but the few inches with a wine splatter — even though I could see in the app that a liquid spill was detected. It took me forever to figure out that I had the Flow 2 in a custom “vacuum and mop at the same time” mode, and that the Flow 2 didn’t want to vacuum over a liquid spill. I’m obviously thankful that the Flow 2 won’t just drive through a puddle and suck wine up into the dust bin, but I’m surprised that the Flow 2 can’t tweak its cleaning strategy, regardless of whether it’s in custom mode. A heads-up like, “I’m not ignoring this spill just to annoy you. Switch me to Freo mode!” would have been nice.

After its initial mapping run, the Flow 2 quietly defaulted rug settings to “cross the carpet without cleaning it.” That’s the Freo smart cleaning system trying to avoid getting rugs wet when mopping, but that feels like an illogical extra step. Other premium robot vacuums automatically clean both floor types on the fly, and simply cut water flow and lift the mop on soft flooring. This setting is buried in the map management maze, and I don’t think most people would assume that it’s a setting they could even toggle. They’d just get pissed off that their new robot vacuum is refusing to vacuum the rug.