Calling Eddington the greatest fictional film yet produced about the COVID-19 pandemic might seem like faint praise. It is not.
True, the list of contenders is not robust. There were some gimmicky efforts that used 2020 lockdown policies as a framing device to isolate characters (Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi, Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion, both released in 2022), but they didn’t truly wrangle with the pandemic’s impact. An underappreciated aspect of Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money (2023) was its surprisingly tactile representation of daily pandemic life. Ultimately, though, that film was a comedy about the GameStop short squeeze and so had different priorities.
With Eddington, even though writer-director Ari Aster has a lot of things on his mind, the pandemic’s ability to scramble people’s minds and throw their moral compasses off kilter is front and center. Meaning this is a film to avoid for anyone uninterested in returning to the days when strangers berated each other in public for wearing or not wearing masks.
A comic neo-Western with a bent for hyperreality and savage satirical viewpoint, Eddington is set in the kind of remote, raggedy New Mexico town where people are on a first-name basis, the scattered businesses look dusty and on the verge of bankruptcy, and more than two cars on the same block qualifies as a traffic jam. Like in many Westerns, the unresolved disputes of a small community are refracted through a looming showdown. Here, the confrontation is between Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), whose animus is ostensibly over masking policies being implemented as the story begins in May 2020.
Joe is an irritable anti-masker who, as an asthmatic, sympathizes with those who say they can’t breathe with them on, while Ted is a dutiful masker who just wants people to follow rules. The men’s mutual dislike goes back to a simmering feud over Joe’s wife Louise (Emma Stone), which is based on an incident that may or may not have happened.
Aster fuzzes fact, rumor, and hyperbole by showing his characters’ worldviews shaped by media and their phones. At first, Joe is frustrated by living with his mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), who drones on about YouTube conspiracy theories and holds himself above All Lives Matter rhetoric once George Floyd protests come to Eddington.
As his fight with Ted escalates from petty insults to street confrontations, Joe starts living more in the dopamine-hazed mania of online discourse circa mid-2020. After getting a dose of Internet fame from being livestreamed, Joe challenges Ted for the mayoral election, drives around town in a truck whose many signs include a rant about Bill Gates, and starts mainlining rage-baiting fake news.
Joe’s transformation mirrors everything else in Eddington’s daylight nightmare world. The crackpot fringe conquers the center as social media sloganeering, rumormongering, and cross-pollinating exasperations take over civic life. Soon Joe’s poorly considered campaign starts to seem like an authentic grassroots reaction to the mayor’s too-smooth predictions of a “tech-positive future” and shady connections to an environmentally disastrous data center being built nearby.
However, very little in Eddington is presented as authentic besides people’s pain, confusion, and despair, all of which is frequently channeled into nonsense or worse. Louise’s hinted-at childhood trauma is exploited by a cultish QAnon-adjacent preacher (Austin Butler, channeling sinister magnetism). Teenaged Brian (Cameron Mann) pretends a passion for social justice to catch the eye of Sarah (Amelie Hoeferle), a white Black Lives Matter protestor more interested in shaming black police deputy Michael (Michael Ward) for not joining her march.
Aster’s acerbic take on the accelerating chaos is masterfully captured through a series of crisply choreographed scenes where clashing sides talk past each other. The strangeness of these moments, galaxy-brained people denouncing abstract ideas or possibly imagined grievances in mundane surroundings, is amplified by Darius Khondji’s crystalline camerawork and Daniel Pemberton’s rumblingly old-fashioned score. Presented in beautifully layered high desert tableaus, Eddington seems to suggest that even in such a stripped-down landscape where everything appears out in the open, secrets and madness dominate.
In Aster’s earlier films, those underlying qualities bubbled to the surface in gut-wrenching ways; see, in 2019’s Midsommar, his undermining of folk ceremony beauty with the savagery in that film’s source material, Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery”. With Eddington, Aster doesn’t disappoint on this score. The final stretch of the film dramatically transitions into a spree of calculated, then increasingly violent, action. Spaghetti Western dramatics and glisteningly gory renderings of bullet-punctured heads are dissonantly paired with the is-this-happening? apocalyptic absurdism of his previous film Beau Is Afraid (2023) as well as the ruminative action-comedy sensibility of Bill Hader’s Barry series (2018-23).
While Eddington is more grounded and does not deliver the Darren Aronofsky-like stratospheric oddity of Beau Is Afraid, it does echo and build on the unexpected streak of humor Aster showed in that film. The unraveling of Phoenix’s Joe shows some of Beau’s panicky anxiety about navigating a world he doesn’t understand. More unexpected in Eddington is Aster’s sharply observant and fearless take on social comedy. Filled though the film is with visual flourishes and on-the-nose topical disputes, its most memorable scenes tend to be the satirical ones.
No major film since Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction (2023) has tackled the culture war fray with the force, specificity, and humor of Eddington. There is an innate visual comedy to the sight of protestors bellowing slogans in an otherwise empty street as Joe’s hilariously baffled three-man police force tries to move them onto the sidewalk. Aster punctures the gaseous self-regard of the protestors, from their Instagram black squares to the white kid screaming about privilege and how he will shut up and listen but only after finishing his speech (which he adds is happening “on stolen land”, fatuously bolting on social justice buzzwords).
Eddington also tackles the similarly unthinking hive-mind of the town’s right-wingers. The latter are satirized somewhat more subtly by a fanciful BLM-related MAGA conspiracy theory that Aster introduces in a final-act twist, which ratchets up the film’s wrenching reality distortion field.
Fantastical without losing touch with lived American reality, Eddington shows Aster journeying from elevated horror auteur to gonzo fever dreamer and now Rüben Östlund-like social satirist. He is expanding his repertoire without losing any of the punch and gutsiness of his earlier work.
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