'Eddington' Review

A journey through the American Inferno

Writer-director Ari Aster has made a career of making epic, violent bad trips into one’s deepest insecurities. He explored intergenerational trauma in the immensely disturbing Hereditary, the collapse of romantic relationship in Midsommar, and a picaresque fable of a man who seems to wear all of the world’s anxiety in Beau Is Afraid. Suffice to say, Aster’s work is not for everyone and, in Eddington, the horror is the banal reality of collective insanity we have been living in since March 2020. There probably won’t be a way to feel this bad in a cinema for a long time.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross, a sheriff in the small New Mexico town of Eddington, who gains popularity through an open defiance of the state mask mandate. Phoenix almost completely disappears into the character in one of his best performances to date. Cross decides to run for mayor against Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), a seeming do-gooder who is in the pocket of Big Tech, which wants to build an AI data center in the town.

Under the surface, though, there is more at play than national politics. Cross’ frigid, chronically ill wife Louise (Emma Stone) might have a past with Garcia and is now getting increasingly involved in a far-right cult of child abuse survivors. All of these events put Joe and Eddington on a path toward mass violence, as Joe’s personal life quickly falls apart and the town descends into riots in response to the death of George Floyd.

The first act of Eddington is a hilarious satire of COVID protocols, performative wokeness, and internet conspiracy theories. It also reconfigures tropes of the classic Western in pandemic terms. A stand-off becomes standing six feet apart, guns become smartphones and masks. Aster and cinematographer Darius Khondji (Se7en and Funny Games) shoot going into a grocery store without a mask on like entering a saloon filled with angry bandits. It is original and audacious.

It then suddenly turns into something much darker and best describable as No Country for Old Men meets The Boys. After about an hour of laughing, my theater became dead silent as we are forced to reckon with the consequences of an increasingly divided country. Aster gets to show here an impressive talent for staging intense action sequences.

As the plot details indicate, Eddington is very political. I do think it ultimately comes down most heavily on the right, even if it spends more time making fun of liberals. Either way, it seems clear that Aster is trying to make the audience uncomfortable, no matter their side of the spectrum. Given the provocative nature of the film, I wanted to get a sense of the general opinion, which I usually don’t do before writing a review. I was then shocked to discover that many of the top reviews on Letterboxd criticized the film for being too right-wing or centrist.

One user said it “embodies the worst elements of centrism.” Another said “I'm in need of a shower to wash the holier-than-thou centrist stink off.” Critical consensus largely doesn’t matter, but it does seem to indicate that Aster is doing something right here.

Through the narrow perspective of Joe, liberal viewers will have to spend time in the head of an initially sympathetic conservative and conservative viewers will have to watch him self-destruct. The anger this may produce is the exact phenomenon Eddington is about – that our ideological differences are manipulated, especially by social media, to destroy any authentic communal bonds we have remaining. We are increasingly unable to see the world through each other’s eyes and to accept criticism ourselves.

As Pope Leo XIV recently said, “Sadly, oddly enough, in a world of burgeoning ‘social’ media, we risk being ever more alone” and that we are “[a]lways immersed in a crowd, yet confused and solitary travelers.” In an interview with Letterboxd, Aster echoed this sentiment saying, “These people, despite being a community of people, are not a community. Despite being in the same rooms as each other, they are living on totally different planes. If anything, hopefully, the effect [of the movie] is that all these screens become queasy-making.”

Aster doesn’t have an answer to our modern predicament, perhaps because he lacks the hope given in Christ’s already-assured victory over death. At the same time, it is hard to deny that we currently live in the bleak reality Eddington ends in. We may have found ourselves in a forest dark, but all is not forsaken, even if we must first travel through “the way that runs among the lost” before we can “see–once more–the stars”.

And one final note on content. Aster’s movies are all rather distressing and graphic. His latest is probably the least so, even if it still contains gory violence (similar to No Country for Old Men) and a bit of disturbing, non-sexual nudity near the end. Even without this content, Aster’s oeuvre is again not for everyone. He has a special talent for instilling existential dread in his audiences.

Eddington is now playing in theaters.