Eddington

The Fever Dream of the Recent Past

I do not think I have fully metabolized May 2020, and I doubt I am alone in that. We were disinfecting groceries, doom-scrolling through videos of racial injustice, and looking at neighbors like possible threats. So of course Ari Aster eventually made a movie out of that pressure-cooker month. *Eddington* turns our collective unraveling into a neo-Western, which is exactly the kind of perverse move Aster would make. Whether the movie actually comes together is another matter. It is prickly, abrasive, and often exhausting on purpose. Watching it can feel like getting trapped inside a Facebook comment war with no exit button. Aster is not trying to soothe anyone.



The monsters this time are not cults or demons but ideas turned feral. In a fictional New Mexico town, an absurd yet deadly sincere mayoral race pits Joaquin Phoenix’s anti-mask sheriff Joe Cross against Pedro Pascal’s smooth incumbent Ted Garcia. Aster has said the real subject is the giant AI data center rising outside town, a symbol of tech quietly profiting while everyone else loses their minds. Maybe. I am not convinced that thread fully lands, because the script is too busy swinging at every target in reach. Still, Darius Khondji’s photography is terrific. The open desert keeps shrinking into cramped, airless spaces as everyone’s sense of reality collapses.



The scene that stayed with me is the one where Joe confronts a small group of local teenagers holding a Black Lives Matter protest on an otherwise empty street. On paper it sounds like a standard generational clash. In Aster’s hands it becomes something sadder and meaner: a mutual recital of slogans, none of them fully understood by the people saying them. The kids repeat social-media language like they are reading cue cards. Joe answers with the same level of cable-news mush. No one is hearing anyone. Aster shoots the dead space between them like a joke that has curdled. David Ehrlich’s description in IndieWire — “a bleak and brilliant look at post-COVID America” — fits especially well there.



What keeps the whole thing from dissolving into pure contempt is Phoenix. He has played frayed nerves plenty of times, including for Aster in *Beau is Afraid*, but Joe is wired differently. He moves forward aggressively, puffing himself up, while his eyes keep flicking around like he is seconds from bolting. Every tug at the duty belt reads less like authority than self-bracing. Emma Stone, as his increasingly unreachable wife Louise, is the perfect eerie counterpart. Stone makes Louise’s descent into internet delusion almost serene: voice flattened, gaze emptied out, mind elsewhere. Owen Gleiberman in *Variety* called the film “a brazenly provocative Western thriller,” which feels fair. It is loud, ungainly, and sometimes a lot to take. But by the end Aster is not merely holding up a mirror to that recent stretch of American life. He is showing how the poison stayed in the bloodstream.