COVID-era tale sure to leave you unsettled

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This article was published 19/07/2025 (384 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Nobody goes to an Ari Aster film to feel comfortable.

The American writer-director’s tortuous new anti-western — which premièred at Cannes to a divided response — is profoundly uncomfortable. Having proven himself a master of unease in Hereditary, Midsommar and Beau Is Afraid, Aster is now presenting a pitch-dark satire of our polarized era that is itself provocatively — and often pointlessly — polarizing.

Along with discomfort, Aster can also be counted on for technical craft, atmospheric dread and interesting work from A-list actors. Ultimately, though, Eddington is a risky thought experiment that goes wrong, its incitements dragging out into overlong incoherence.

Set in rural New Mexico in May 2020, in the uncertain early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the story starts with a showdown between town mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal from The Last of Us) and county sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix, who worked with Aster on Beau Is Afraid).

Ted supports the public health measures he hopes will keep the community safe. Joe, meanwhile, refuses to enforce the state mask mandate, citing individual freedom, and pretty soon he’s driving around in one of those SUVs plastered with red, white and blue “patriot” stickers and slogans.

What might feel jarring to some viewers — many fans of A24 movies skew left — is that Joe, at least initially, is presented as the most sympathetic character and the one whose point of view we follow. He’s a devoted husband to his wife, Louise (Emma Stone), who’s living with an anxiety disorder, and he’s dealing with an extremely online mother-in-law, Dawn (The Penguin’s Dierdre O’Connell), who has fallen into a rabbit-hole of internet conspiracy theories.

Ted is coded as liberal (and of course played by the supercool Pascal), but seems to be in bed with big developers and wealthy tech guys who are planning a data centre that will suck up the town’s water and energy. He comes off as a phony, a hypocrite, and — even worse, in 2020 — he’s a toilet-paper hoarder.

Anyone ready to seize on Eddington as anti-“woke” should be warned, though. Aster is actually playing with viewer expectations, engineering the audience’s emotional reactions to work at cross-purposes to their ideological beliefs, deliberately messing with reflexive political responses on both sides of the spectrum.

Through his characters’ complicated feuds, he’s demonstrating that what can seem like principled political stands are often covers for personal grievance and psychological turmoil. He also switches up audience assumptions and allegiances several times — Joe is going to do some truly terrible things — as the story devolves into an increasingly violent and hallucinatory hellscape.

Things take another turn after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, as the Black Lives Matter movement spreads across the country. One of the town’s few Black residents is Michael (Empire of Light’s Micheal Ward), a sheriff’s deputy working to quell the protests on the town’s main street, while the protesters are mostly middle-class white kids, constantly announcing the burden of their privilege and making speeches about not having the right to make speeches.

At this point, the town of Eddington starts to feel like the toxic epicentre of America’s social and political dysfunction. There’s a charismatic creep of a QAnon-style cult leader (Austin Butler). There are progressive purity tests. There are the alienating effects of tech, the constant drip of social-media disinformation and incentivized online outrage.

Everybody is constantly filming everybody else, which is initially touted as transparency but soon feels more like surveillance.

And just in case the viewers are having any doubts about the inescapably angry and screwed-up state of America, there’s a literal (!) dumpster fire.

Aster is toying around with each side’s worst prejudices about the other side, while simultaneously asking us to see everyone as human beings. That’s a tricky stance. While it gets some support from Phoenix’s emotive and oddly vulnerable work, Pascal and Stone are given less to do and end up feeling less like people and more like symbols.

Eddington does function extremely well as a document of the COVID era. Aster calls up the industrial-sized bottles of hand sanitizer, the drive-up testing stations, the ordeal of grocery shopping and the awkward, socially distanced outside gatherings. He tracks the confusion and resentment and rage rushing into the pandemic’s vacuum of anxiety and isolation.

While the initial shootouts between Ted and Joe involved iPhones, we eventually end up outside the town’s Pistol Palace, hurtling suddenly towards a deranged ending — gory, grotesque and psychologically unsettling.

The narrative descends into surreal darkness, a vision of American history as an endless cycle of gun-fuelled retribution, with masked characters firing into the night, not even sure who their enemy is.

Aster is presenting an elaborate and ambitious conceptual setup, but in the end, the film lacks the discipline to pull it off.

At one point, Joe says, “We need to free each other’s hearts.”

Eddington might be hoping to free us, but its disjointed, stretched-out narrative and inflammatory images might just further entrench us.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca