Eddington (2025) (dir. Ari Aster)
With each subsequent film from Aster, I find flaws that stand out rather than sense any growth or maturity. Eddington might be his weakest work to date but it's still worth discussing regardless.
Ari Aster has built his reputation on films that burrow under your skin, embodying anxiety and dread as inevitable forces of human nature that cannot be easily processed. In fact, they can be all-consuming to the point of self-sabotage. His latest work, Eddington, has the potential to make viewers re-examine their reactions at the time of 2020 and how skewed perspectives have influenced our current reality. If only it hit harder, had more of a potent message to convey and didn’t go on as long as it does. I get it, America kinda sucks and the pandemic only seemed to indicate we haven’t learned from past mistakes.
With Hereditary (which I loved) and Midsommar (which I liked), he established himself as a filmmaker drawn towards intense psychological dynamics, crafting narratives that felt both personal and universally unsettling. His third feature, Beau Is Afraid, marked a departure into surreal dark comedy territory, dividing audiences with its maximalist approach and three-hour runtime. Certainly, the running theme of generational and collective trauma continues here.
The first hour of Beau remains my favorite of all of Aster’s work (probably because it reminds me of Scorsese’s After Hours) but then it prattles on to the point of detour especially during a theatrical production midway through. Now, with Eddington, Aster ventures into even more contentious waters, attempting to satirize the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of a small-town political battle. The result is a story that feels both timely and tone-deaf, ambitious and shallow, committed and confused about what it's trying to say.
Set in the fictional town of Eddington during the fraught month of May 2020, the film follows Sheriff Joe Cross, played by Joaquin Phoenix. Joe is a man out of step with the times, refusing to wear a mask and bristling at state-mandated COVID protocols. His antagonist is the town's incumbent mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) with his trademark charm turned toward political glad-handing. Ted represents everything Joe despises about contemporary liberal politics because he does connect with others: he wears his N95, speaks in measured tones about community safety, and has plans to bring an AI data center to their sleepy desert town. There’s a reason the film opens and closes with that image.
The personal becomes political when it's revealed that Ted has a romantic history with Joe's wife Louise, played by Emma Stone in a role that feels frustratingly underwritten. She’s barely in this which is one of the key flaws to underuse one of our best actresses working today. Louise spends her days crafting disturbing sculptures that seem to process some unnamed trauma while dodging the conspiracy theory videos her mother Dawn, played with manic energy by Deirdre O'Connell, constantly shares. When Joe decides to run for mayor on an anti-mask, anti-establishment platform, the simmering tensions in Eddington threaten to boil over into something far more dangerous.
Aster's screenplay attempts to capture the overwhelming chaos of 2020 by throwing every major cultural flashpoint of that year into his narrative blender. George Floyd protests arrive in Eddington, led by a well-meaning but performative white teenager who seems more interested in Instagram activism than genuine change. QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theories spread through the community like wildfire.
A charismatic cult leader named Vernon Jefferson Peak, played by Austin Butler in a role that feels like a waste of his considerable screen presence, draws Louise into his orbit with promises of spiritual awakening. Social media doom scrolling is a part of the story complete with contradictory information, memes, and outrage. It's an accurate representation of how 2020 felt to live through, but accuracy doesn't necessarily translate to compelling cinema.
The central problem is that it tries to be about everything while saying very little about anything. Aster seems to believe that simply depicting the absurdities of 2020 constitutes meaningful commentary, but Eddington rarely digs deeper than surface-level observations. Yes, people were divided about masks. Yes, social media amplified misinformation. Yes, performative activism was rampant. These are not particularly insightful revelations five years after the fact, and the film's treatment of these issues feels more like a greatest hits compilation of pandemic-era talking points than a cohesive artistic statement.
Phoenix delivers another committed performance as Joe Cross, finding moments of surprising vulnerability beneath the character's bluster and bigotry. There are glimpses of a more interesting film in the quieter scenes where Joe's insecurities and failures as a husband and lawman become apparent. One of the better moments involves him trying to communicate to his wife through a glass door while she’s lying in bed. He's clearly meant to represent a certain type of American masculinity in crisis, a man who sees his authority and relevance slipping away and lashes out at convenient targets. Phoenix navigates these complexities with his usual skill, but the script doesn't give him enough to work with beyond broad strokes characterization.
Pascal fares less well as Ted Garcia, though this seems more a function of the writing than his performance. Ted is supposed to represent liberal political hypocrisy, but the film's critique of him feels toothless compared to its savage treatment of Joe. Where Joe is allowed moments of genuine pathos, Ted remains a collection of political clichés. The same problem plagues most of the supporting cast. Stone's Louise disappears for long stretches of the film, emerging only to advance plot points or provide exposition about her mysterious past trauma. Butler's cult leader feels like he wandered in from a different movie entirely, and his scenes with Louise lack the psychological complexity that made Aster's previous explorations of manipulation so effective.
The film's visual approach, handled by the great cinematographer Darius Khondji, attempts to ground moments of surreality in a realistic aesthetic that evokes classic Westerns or No Country for Old Men (especially in the final act). The New Mexico landscape is captured with sun-bleached beauty, and there are moments where the film achieves the mythic quality Aster seems to be reaching for. A nighttime sequence where Joe searches for an unseen assailant builds genuine tension through careful camera movement and sound design. But these technical achievements can't overcome the fundamental issues with the screenplay.
Eddington's significant failing is its inability to maintain a consistent tone. The film veers wildly between broad comedy and genuine horror, often within the same scene. Some moments did make me laugh and wince in the way a quality cringe-comedy succeeds at. A sequence where Joe creates campaign materials with his deputies starts as amusing political satire but quickly becomes uncomfortable as the characters' casual racism and misogyny becomes apparent. The film seems to want credit for depicting these attitudes without taking a clear stance on them, resulting in a work that feels morally unsound.
The runtime of two hours and twenty-eight minutes feels punishing, particularly given how repetitive many of the film's themes become especially during a final confrontation that feels like it should be the final scene. Aster returns again and again to the same wells: social media toxicity, political polarization, performative activism, conspiracy theories. Each iteration adds little new insight, and the film begins to feel like it's lecturing rather than illuminating. The pacing issues that plagued Beau Is Afraid return here with a vengeance, suggesting that Aster may benefit from more aggressive editing in future projects.
Eddington arrives at a moment when thoughtful examination of the pandemic era feels more necessary than ever. Five years later, many of the divisions that emerged during COVID have only deepened, and the lessons we might have learned seem to have been largely forgotten. There's rich material here for a filmmaker willing to dig beneath the surface, but Aster seems content to skim along the top, pointing out absurdities without offering much in the way of understanding or insight.
Another takeaway is that the treatment of its female characters is particularly troubling. Louise, Dawn, and the young activist are all portrayed as either mentally unstable, easily manipulated, or performatively shallow. Given the criticism Aster received for his handling of women in Beau Is Afraid, this feels like a step backward rather than growth as a filmmaker. The women in Eddington exist primarily to serve the male characters' narratives, and their own agency and complexity are largely ignored.
The experience of watching this does raise important questions about the role of art in processing collective trauma. Should artists wait longer before attempting to satirize recent events? Is there a responsibility to offer more than just reflection of chaos back at audiences, especially since it can be perceived as exploitative? Eddington doesn't answer these questions satisfactorily, but it does demonstrate the risks of rushing to judgment on events that are still too close to process clearly. For a better example of this, I highly recommend watching Emma Stone at her best alongside the great Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie. Yes, it may be a ten-episode series, but Showtime’s The Curse is really one of the better explorations of white privilege, virtue signaling and covert narcissism. All of which Eddington touches on but never fully fleshes out.
Great satirical works find ways to impose order on chaos, to find meaning in madness. For Aster's devoted fanbase, Eddington will likely be seen as another bold experiment from a filmmaker unafraid to take risks which I can completely get behind. But boldness alone doesn't guarantee success, and this film feels more like a misfire than a meaningful artistic statement. The director's next project will be crucial in determining whether his last two films represent a temporary stumble or a more fundamental loss of direction. Eddington offers the same confusion and anger that characterized its subject period, without the wisdom that should come with temporal distance. For a filmmaker who has previously demonstrated such keen insight into human psychology and social dynamics, this feels like a significant disappointment.