‘Eddington’ Review: Ari Aster’s Pandemic Parable Goes Off the Rails

The United States—maybe the world—might be in desperate need of a film that actually grapples with the present: with how the pandemic supercharged political extremism, especially the conspiratorial kind that feeds on dubious “online research” and spills into real-world violence. The clearest example is the rise of MAGA culture, Donald Trump and his circle, and the way that entire phenomenon echoed across the globe, spawning various—and often ludicrous—far-right movements. Unfortunately, that film is not Eddington, and Ari Aster is not the person for the job.

Aster is a very good horror director suddenly elevated to the rank of auteur, but he’s already shown that the mantle sits awkwardly on him. While Eddington isn’t as baffling or out-there as Beau Is Afraid, it has the same core issues: a blaring, underlined, grandiose tone, as if he believed he were delivering profound universal truths when he’s really just regurgitating familiar ideas. Aster is bold, yes, and in an industry obsessed with calculation, his recklessness can be refreshing. But my sense is that his talent rarely keeps pace with his ambitions.

Eddington is a fictional New Mexico town still in full pandemic mode when the film begins, complete with distancing measures and protective protocols. But the local sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), doesn’t buy any of it: he goes around maskless, takes no precautions, and tries to keep the peace without getting himself into trouble. Things at home are even more unhinged. His mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell) falls for every conspiracy theory she encounters online and spreads them around, while his wife, Louise (Emma Stone), suffers from depression and also follows the self-styled “gurus” who thrived on social media during the pandemic—and still do today.

Cross also has an adversary: Mayor Ted García (Pedro Pascal), who follows every rule to the letter and presents himself as the progressive candidate in an upcoming local election. For reasons not entirely political—old tensions involving García and Cross’s wife—Joe decides to run against him as the candidate of the permanently outraged. He radicalizes himself and attracts every crank and flat-earther in town. Not that García’s supporters are all paragons of rational moderation: they can be excessively woke, and when Black Lives Matter comes up, they also go off the rails, heightening the conflict even further.

Between TikToks, Zoom calls, Instagram Lives, and increasingly bizarre news clips, Eddington mutates into an urban western, a full-on brawl in the middle of the ideological trenches. The film leans toward satire and absurdity, though—one must admit—much of what it shows is barely exaggerated. Working on that edge and pushing everything to unusual extremes of violence, Aster tries to offer a bitterly humorous reflection on “the state of the world,” a “what is wrong with us?” that mostly relies on simplistic ideas and a false equivalence between political extremes.

The film also touches, amid all this noise, on Indigenous issues, data-storage farms, vaccines, algorithms, social media, gun control, pseudo-religious cults (enter Austin Butler in a small but crucial role), and just about every topic that exploded during the pandemic and still permeates daily life. The conflicts between the adults spill into their children’s lives as well.

Around the halfway mark of this two-and-a-half-hour film, the humor starts to recede. Aster ratchets up the tension and violence, as if the Altman-style ’70s satire he flirted with at the start suddenly gives way to a pitch-black small-town thriller. And while he’s at his best in this mode—fewer loose ideas tossed around, more straightforward action and suspense—it’s a little too late to rescue this flawed attempt at reflecting on the recent past. Maybe the film needed more time to marinate. Or maybe it needed a filmmaker with more original and relevant ideas to put on the table.