2020 was not the year America turned sour, but it was the year that our social fabric was torn open. A rotten heart laid bare to fester over the last five years. It was a boiling point that many would rather leave behind. But not Ari Aster, who exploded onto the scene in 2018 with Hereditary and whose last film can best be described as an absurdist, fantastical comedy about the most anxious man on Earth (Beau is Afraid). Drawing praise and attention from the likes of Martin Scorsese, Aster has shown no sign of slowing down, and his new film, Eddington, is by far his most ambitious undertaking yet.
Eddington stars Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal as two central figures amid a larger tableau of townsfolk in this sprawling ensemble piece, following a feud between an anti-masking New Mexico sheriff (Phoenix) and a liberal-minded mayor (Pascal) that turns explosive during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. A dark-comedy period piece only a few years removed from said period, Eddington strikes a chord that will feel uncomfortably close to home for many audiences. It is not comfortable, but it is clearly not meant to be.
Making such a boldly contemporary, political movie is sure to draw fire from all sides, but Aster wisely focuses the brunt of his criticism onto a broader American problem, not any individual belief. The harsh truth that lies at the center of Eddington is that every faction of modern America has been infected by external pressures. People are struggling through financial, personal and medical woes. Through doom scrolling and at a loss for real solutions, they turn to bad-faith grifters who take advantage of their pain. This is how dogma sets in. We see this in Emma Stone’s character, the wife of the sheriff who is increasingly pulled into a QAnon-style belief system by a charismatic cult leader (Austin Butler). Aster grants this ensemble enough humanity that their various downfalls feel tragic, even if you disagree with nearly everything they stand for.
That is not to say that Eddington is entirely non-partisan. The film has no qualms with showing culture-war conspiracy theories for what they are: abjectly misguided and dangerous. Aster’s politics might be mistaken as fence-sitting, but Eddington does have a point of view, just not one that many people want to accept because it involves an admission that we are as susceptible to being perpetrators as we are likely to be victims when it comes to the issues of performative politics, digital-age misinformation, and exploiting others’ trauma for our own image.
The townsfolk of Eddington are not political because they feel strongly about the issues. They are political because they are angry, desperate, vulnerable, and in search of any outlet for those confused emotions. Political action is a vehicle for personal gain, ulterior motives bleed through every choice made, whether by teens organizing protests, small business owners who refuse to mask up, or the seemingly well-intended mayor. Even he is compromised, tied up in the business interests of an AI company wanting to build an environmentally detrimental data center on Native land.
If Eddington seems cynical and ugly, it is merely a reflection of America’s status quo. It is a sprawling movie that balances broad satire with genuine craft, building up to a third-act shootout that earns its Western genre labelling. Aster shows a strong talent for constructing an action set piece, with a climax that evokes No Country For Old Men. Westerns have long explored the dark heart of America—the displacement of Indigenous Americans, corrupt town leadership and bloodthirsty sheriffs—and Eddington goes to all of those places with a bold, fearlessly modern approach.
8 out of 10
Eddington is in theaters now.
This article appears in Jul 4-31, 2025.