There was a point in Ari Aster’s Eddington, when I was dreading the fact that I had to sit through another hour of this. It is the moment when it felt certain that I was watching an Ari Aster movie. Few American directors, let alone ones with mainstream success, are more willing to fully embrace discomfort than Aster, the bad vibe cultivator behind Hereditary (2017), Midsommar (2019), and Beau is Afraid (2023) . His latest film Eddington, takes on the not-so-herculean task of finding bad vibes in the American experience circa June, 2020. Mission accomplished.
Eddington is set in the fictional small town of Eddington, New Mexico. Where three months of limited human interaction, doomscrolling, and burgeoning national outrage over the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, have taken a toll on the townspeople. At the centre of the film is the clash between Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), a moderate liberal, and conservative Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix). Starting from a place of mutual disrespect, the feud between the two quickly escalates as Sheriff Joe begins to publicly challenge the Mayor’s backing of mask mandates and social distancing protocols. It’s best not to say too much about where things go from here plotwise other than to say they escalate a great deal.
Cloaked in existential dread but less of a traditional horror movie than anything Aster has made previously, Eddington is a political satire, a conspiracy thriller, a neo-noir and a western. In other words, Eddington is a whole lot of movie. While some aspects fall particularly flat, I found the sum of its parts to be quite effective.
Aster remains uniquely adept at crafting absurd, unforgettable sequences of visual carnage. The handful of violent setpieces are as finely crafted and instantly iconic as those found in Heriditary or Midsommar . Furthermore, the entire ensemble is excellent. Phoenix and Pascal are doing great work, bringing nuance, menace and dread to characters that could easily be one-dimensional caricature in lesser hands. They are supported by a great, often understated, ensemble including Emma Stone as Sheriff Cross’s estranged wife, Austin Butler as an enigmatic Q-coded influencer/psuedo-cult leader, Diedre O’Connell (coming off her appearance as an abusive nightmare mother in The Penguin ) as a worthy entrant into the illustrious canon of Ari Aster abusive nightmare mothers, and countless others who help fully realize the town of Eddington, including potential breakout Cameron Mann, the best of a strong group of teens and twentysomethings who make up the outraged youth of Eddington.
Aster is well aware that the commentary on recent history found throughout Eddington is quite loaded. You get the impression watching the film that Aster is hoping it has something in it to outrage people all across the political spectrum. Unfortunately, many of the more intentionally provocative characters and ideas are a little too half-baked to elicit much more than an eyeroll. At times I found some of the more explicitly satirical elements a little too late-era South Park for my own tastes
Many will no doubt unfavourably compare Eddington to last year’s Civil War in its nebulous all- sides approach to contemporary American civil unrest. However, I would argue that Aster’s film, like Civil War , is more interested in the emotional experience of a fractured nation spiraling towards oblivion, than it is in reinforcing the facts or making any determination of right or wrong. Eddington captures how it feels to live in the present moment (a moment that we have not escaped in the 5 years since the film is set, and which doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon) in vivid and cathartic detail. Aster has set up a world where the core facts of existence are absorbed not through schooling and real-world experience but through the careful curation of individualized algorithms on our phones, laptops, and tablets. A world where individuals can seldom trust their own perception of reality, let alone the reality perceived by their parents, spouses, peers, neighbours, co-workers, or public officials. Eddington suggests that the natural result of this state is isolation, disorientation, paranoia, despair and ultimately violence. No doubt this is a nihilistic and unpleasant assessment of the current state of affairs, but it is one that is hard to dismiss entirely.
While many of the anxieties of 2020 are broadly universal, I do think there was a specific anxiety amongst filmmakers that film production may never return to the scale it once existed. While the studio system remains as craven as ever, we have seen a renewed push by directors in the past four years towards ambitious, potentially divisive filmmaking, a commitment to a sort of post-covid maximalism. While not as ambitious as Beau is Afraid (a core text in the Post-Covid Maximalist canon, along with such films as Megalopolis and Elvis) , Eddington is an incredibly ambitious movie - it maneuvers a wide variety of genres to try and earnestly confront so many of the great issues of our times. In the wake of the arguably disastrous commercial and critical performance of Beau is Afraid, it would have been far more sensible for Aster to retreat after Beau is Afraid, into something smaller in scope and far more likely to garner universal acclaim. I suspect that many will write off Eddington just like Beau is Afraid, as a self-indulgent mess. While I don’t really disagree with this characterization on its face, I fundamentally reject any negative connotation. Filmmaking is a personal artform, and Aster’s commitment to mining the depths of his anxieties and bringing them all to the surface for us to see is something to be commended.
Rating: 4/5
Recommended follow-up watches:
1. If you liked Eddington , check out No Country for Old Men (2007), the neo-noir western masterpiece that came to mind throughout the film.
2. If the commentary in Eddington left you wanting, check out Hard Truths (2024), while not at all based in contemporary American culture war, it is in my opinion the most accurate and humane film yet made about outrage culture of the 2020s