A pattern seems to be emerging in Ari Aster’s films. His first, Hereditary, and his third, Beau Is Afraid, are both psychological horrors about dysfunctional parental relationships. His second, Midsommar, and his fourth, Eddington, use genre conventions to examine the comforting allure of extremist politics.
What’s a little worrying is that Aster doesn’t really seem to have a solid grasp on either of these topics. With COVID-era neo-Western Eddington, he’s completely out of his depth.
After the rampant misreads of Midsommar (sorry, folks, but it’s about a white supremacist breeding cult, not bad boyfriends), Aster throws all subtlety out of the window in his attempt to build a grand unification theory of What Is Wrong With America Today. His Eddington is a pastiche of the modern Southwest, a small town with a dying main street that is convinced it can become a tech center by giving incentives to a crypto server farm. It is the setting for what can only be seen as a political fantasy in which any of Aster’s hopes for incisive commentary dry up and blow away. This is where Sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix) is feuding with Mayor Ted Garcia (Pascal) just as the pandemic is really starting to hit.
Aster’s Eddington is a place where everyone’s favorite conspiracy is true. Every politician is corrupt! Mask advocates don’t really wear their masks! Black Lives Matter protesters are just showing off! There really are crack Antifa terror squads! Every crackpot idea that Aster can’t stuff in the script is filtered through Dawn (O’Connell), Sheriff Cross’ Facebook-stalking truther mother-in-law who has fallen under the sway of a manosphere-esque cult leader/influencer (Butler uncomfortably channeling Russell Brand). Much as he despises her, Cross timidly but increasingly echoes every insane belief and presents them as virtue. His first standoff of many with Ted is over masks in the supermarket, and it just gets bloodier from there.
Maybe with the right degree of absurdism or a more suitable cast, the farcical elements of Eddington might have flourished. But Aster’s style is too dry, and his cast too detached from the material to really make any of it work. Possibly Phoenix was still tired after the high-kicking demands of Joker: Folie à Deux, as his torpid performance as the world’s least convincing small-town sheriff has all the energy of a dead truck battery, like Aster handed him a note that read, “Nick Nolte in Affliction but as a simpering beta cuck with asthma.” No one is going to buy the guy from C’mon C’mon as a knockoff Joe Arpaio. It’s misguided casting, but then Eddington is a film seemingly dedicated to wasting a talented cast. Playing Cross’ increasingly distant wife, Emma Stone continues in her commitment to turning her back on Hollywood by working with every semi-edgy director out there, with diminishing results as she relies on quirks to replace character. As for man-of-the-year Pascal, he’s actively anti-charismatic here as the mayor who Cross actively loathes for personal, not political reasons. It all feels like A-listers playing at rural New Mexico, cold and inauthentic.
Eddington’s worst sin is that it implicitly subscribes to the idea that everyone is an idiot. Even the police officers from the neighboring reservation who are at least suspicious of Cross don’t wear their masks correctly, which Aster puts in the same criminal category as mass shootings. This may be his most ambitious work to date but his grand landscape of modern social dysfunction seems to be to no real end, without either a true nihilist’s commitment to bleakness or a wishy-washy “can’t we all get along?” plea to give it some kind of resolution. America undoubtedly needs serious artists to explore the brain worms that the pandemic era gave the body politic, but Eddington most definitely ain’t it.
This article appears in July 18 • 2025.
