I don’t know if there’s any filmmaker capable of making their audience feel deep-rooted, uncomfortable anxiety quite like Ari Aster. His latest, the provocative, somewhat aimless Eddington, is his version of the social horror that we might see from someone like Jordan Peele. It’s a film that seeks to capture the moment we’re living in now and, let’s be honest, things are pretty horrific. How did we get here? Where did it all start? Eddington doesn’t offer a lot of answers, but that creeping dread of being pulled back to the paranoid insanity of the pandemic, and the criminals who took advantage of it, will send a shiver down your spine.
Eddington centers around two powerful men in a small, fictional New Mexico town at the start of the coronavirus outbreak in May 2020. Joaquin Phoenix is Eddington sheriff Joe Cross, with Pedro Pascal as his rival, liberal mayor and bar owner Ted Garcia. Joe is kinda pathetic. Emma Stone plays his wife Louise, who doesn’t really like to be touched by him, due to a traumatic event from her past that may or may not involve Ted. Joe’s mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) is camped out on their couch and stuffing their heads with wild conspiracy theories. Joe is taking a stand against the recent mask mandate; meanwhile, Ted is always sporting an N-95 mask, so much so that he’s barely intelligible.
These two are headed for a showdown, and Aster frames Eddington as a sort of neo-Western, but one where the law is a dweeb we feel sorry for. Sensing the mood of the public, Joe takes up an anti-masking stance just so he can challenge Ted in the mayoral election. Pretty soon, he’s driving up and down the town streets shouting conspiracy theories from a megaphone. All of this because Joe doesn’t have much in his life to make himself feel like a man.
The thing is, Joe is like a lot of the charlatans and grifters who rose to prominence during the COVID-19 outbreak. They fueled paranoia, distrust in the government, stoked fear, all to become famous and to make some money, regardless of the damage they cause. Those people are still among us now, capitalizing on chaos and dividing the country irreparably. This idea is embodies by Austin Butler, who plus just such a charlatan, Vernon Jefferson Peak, who has begun a cult that ensnares Louise and her mom.
The most disturbing aspect of Eddington is how accurate it is at showing how the pandemic, combined with heaping amounts of disinformation, fear over Black Lives Matter protests, and disruptive lockdown procedures, sent people spiraling in unexpected directions. Aster creates a tattered fabric of misguided souls, fueled by culture war hysteria. There’s Micheal Ward as Michael, the Black sheriff deputy who seems blissfully disinterested in the inherent racism of the moment. This drives his White ex-girlfriend, Sarah, played by Amelie Hoeferle, crazy as she becomes the unlikely leader of the local BLM movement. There’s Michael’s partner, sheriff deputy Luke, played by Luke Grimes, who becomes so outraged by the George Floyd protests that he starts turning Joe against all Black men, including Michael. Along with a massive data center being built in the heart of the town against the wishes of the Native American population, it’s beginning to feel like a powder keg just waiting for someone to toss a match.
Aster is the guy to toss that match, and mostly it’s as inflammatory and goading as he wants it to be. Eddington is designed to enrage us, but I’m not sure it offers much else. And there’s something unseemly about seeing the BLM/George Floyd protests being used in a cynical way, bordering on comedic. Again, it’s enraging.
The film is shot with an abundance of style by DP Darius Khondji, who captures the danger and silliness of the moment, filtered through the hazy light of classic Westerns. Aster ramps up the visuals with digital “doomscrolling” interludes, capturing our own social media addiction to all of the worst things happening around us. Admit it, we all did it and probably still do.
Aster’s terrifyingly skillful depiction of our crumbling society is what drives Eddington at its best. Along with another strong, sympathetic, darkly comic performance by Phoenix, the film works best as a cruel reminder of a time we’d all like to forget. It falters and stumbles once Aster gives in to the violence we all know is coming, but by then Eddington has done what it was set out to do, which is to scare us and piss us off in equal measure.
A24 releases Eddington into theaters on July 18th.
