Eddington: An Ambitious and Bizarre Satire (Early Review)

After being hailed as one of our generation’s most distinctive new voices with modern classics Hereditary and Midsommar, it has been fascinating to witness filmmaker Ari Aster transition his brand of paranoid, emotionally eviscerating powder-keg cinema into absurd, nightmarish comedies. And yet, Aster has always considered his films to be funny—even before audiences were ready to laugh. Where his earlier work mined familial grief and pagan horror through the slow unraveling of buried secrets, Aster’s latest turns its gaze outward, toward a collapsing, disconnected national psyche, revealing a collective tension simmering beneath the surface of pandemic-era America. Never one to flinch at dressing up bad taste with a polished sheen, Aster’s latest film, Eddington, is an ambitious and bizarre COVID satire that may lose some specificity the further it leans into broad provocation, yet ultimately reaffirms the filmmaker’s greatest strengths: a sharp command of tone and image, a morbid sense of humor, and a quiet tenderness for his doomed, dimwitted characters.

The film is set in the summer of 2020, in the small town of Eddington, New Mexico (population 2,600)—the kind of town destined to be forgotten until the pandemic sparks it into relevance. A town falling into collective insanity and delusion, the film opens with local sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix) spending his days enforcing mask mandates and dispersing protestors against police brutality—in a town that includes just three officers, one of them a Black man. At home, the underutilized but skillfully cast Emma Stone plays Cross’s wife, Louise. Two beings who seem like they might have crossed paths in an earlier life but now live in separate worlds, Louise spends her days spiraling through the internet, obsessing over the handsome Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), a conspiracy-theory QAnon-esque televangelist (intervangelist?).

Witnessing a man being denied entry to the local grocery store for not wearing a mask while on patrol, Cross’ decision to step in spirals into a confrontation with the town’s tech-industry-tainted mayor—Pascal’s Ted Garcia—a supposed progressive who plans to hand over the outskirts of Eddington to an AI data center no one asked for. Out of confusion, stubbornness, and a desperation to reclaim authority, Cross decides to run against him.

Eventually, in true Aster fashion, a mid-point shift jolts the audience, and the film changes gears, tossing any sense of predictability out the window. Phoenix—an undeniable talent who’s lost some of his element of surprise in recent years as he leans deeper into the acting tics he’s developed—struggles at times to keep pace with the shifting narrative and the internal logic of his thinly sketched character. Fortunately, Grimes and Michael Ward, playing Joe Cross’s fellow officers, step into larger supporting roles and inject just enough watercooler racial tension through their subtly contrasting performances.

As the film enters its chaotic third act, Aster’s command over tone and pacing tightens; trusting the audience to sit in disorientation, Phoenix begins to find something jagged and arresting. By the time the finale arrives—culminating in a surprisingly nail-biting cat-and-mouse sequence—Phoenix delivers some of his most gripping work in years: a performance powered by confusion and exhaustion, beneath all the huffing and puffing.

Notably, Eddington is Aster’s first film that attempts to capture “our reality.” Working with first-time collaborator Darius Khondji, the towns and hills of New Mexico are rendered with visual grandeur—the openness of the landscape contrasted sharply with the suffocation on screen. Composer Daniel Pemberton (Into the Spider-Verse, Materialists), aiding longtime Aster collaborator Bobby Krlic, brings a new energy to the mix. In many ways, Eddington is Aster’s most modern film, although hilariously set in a town stuck in 2010, with one of its greatest moments involving a noise complaint showdown scored to Katy Perry’s “Firework.” There are no folk-horror blemishes, no Swedish pagan cults, no giant penis monsters; sometimes reality is cartoonish enough—until Aster loses his grip on it.

For much of its runtime, Eddington feels like empty, juvenile provocation—poking at America’s political divisions with the blunt force of a very online filmmaker. One recurring gag involves the evolution of a teenager named Brian: first introduced Googling Angela Davis facts to impress a girl, he gradually becomes one of the film’s sharpest and funniest insights into performative politics. Elsewhere, Aster makes the more reckless decision to depict ANTIFA as a literal guerrilla-terrorist organization—a choice that may aim for satire but lands with little clarity or consequence. It’s in these extremes that Eddington grows most grating. Butler’s cameo as a Charles Manson-esque televangelist obsessed with pedophile conspiracy theories is delivered with such unexpected charisma that it only highlights Aster’s incuriosity toward these characters, making the whole thing feel less like a timely jab and more like a cartoon—often revealing Eddington to be about as politically nuanced as a good South Park episode, just several years too late.

And yet, from political corruption and Black Lives Matter protests to the rise of online conspiracy theories and performative liberal politics, Eddington succeeds most as the first COVID film to truly capture what it felt like to experience digital overstimulation in isolation—paving the way for online echo chambers that would eventually explode into real life. Without mentioning MAGA or Trump, Aster explores what it’s like to live in a world where everyone exists in their own reality, where the only way to get a leg up in the system is tearing another down, where every day feels like survival as technology and social media perpetuate false narratives, and where empathy is rarely extended to what’s directly in front of us.

While occasionally underdeveloped, Eddington’s gorgeous cinematography, morbid sense of humor, precise pacing, and colorful cast of characters make it one of Ari Aster’s most compelling films yet—an ambitious blend of tragedy and farce that strikes a far better balance than his previous outing, the tediously cruel Beau Is Afraid. Whether Eddington is stupid or brilliant is anyone’s call, but at this point, Aster seems entirely comfortable not caring what you think either way.

still courtesy of VVS Films

If you liked this, please read our other reviews here and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter or Instagram or like us on Facebook.

J.A. Birney

letterboxd.com/nonameno5/