The best cinematic car chases are propulsive, staged to get your heart racing in tandem with the speeding vehicles. One Battle After Another has a few, but it’s the political thriller’s climactic sequence that shifts into a new gear of inventiveness and originality.

(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)

Three intersecting plotlines—a man searching for his kidnapped daughter, a teenager fleeing her captors and a White supremacist tasked with eliminating all evidence of an interracial relationship—converge in a single file on the undulating hills of Texas Dip, in Borrego Springs, California.

The choice of setting is crucial—across the desert hills, it’s hard for drivers to see the road ahead of them until they’re right at the top, about to barrel down, a fitting metaphor for a movie that moves at

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