‘Eddington': The early days of covid seen through a glass, weirdly

Washington Post

17-07-2025

Since making his sensational debut in 2018 with the disquietingly effective horror movie 'Hereditary,' Ari Aster has secured a place for himself as American cinema's chief purveyor of free-floating unease. His follow-up films, 'Midsommar' and 'Beau is Afraid,' elaborated on his auteurial signature, one by way of an exquisitely executed exercise in mannered ritual, the other a Pynchon-esque picaresque of male anxiety, dysfunction and self-sabotage.
Joaquin Phoenix portrayed the tortured title character in 'Beau is Afraid,' and returns as a similarly addled semihero in 'Eddington,' Aster's answer to the covid age. Set in May 2020 in an eponymous fictional town in New Mexico (Aster's home state), 'Eddington' is rife with period signifiers, from arguments about masks, mandates and social distancing to spontaneous protests after the killing of George Floyd.
Phoenix plays Joe Cross, Eddington's mild-mannered sheriff, who patrols the sleepy streets with a perpetual five o'clock shadow and live-and-let-live attitude. His nemesis, an ambitious, by-the-numbers mayor named Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), is punctilious about following the rules sent down by the governor, a political ally; he's also advocating for the construction of an enormous data center that critics say will suck up the town's already scarce water and power. After Joe and Ted have a showdown — presumably about public protocols, but really about something unresolved in their past — Joe decides to run for mayor. He decorates the sheriff's car with signs, flags, tassels and a bullhorn; his campaign motto is 'Joe for air.'
This might all sound like ripe fodder for a biting social satire, but Aster positions 'Eddington' as a modern-day western, where guns have been replaced by phones that people aim at each other to capture images that are either humiliating, incriminating or deifying. It's a smart concept, but like most of the movie it isn't fully realized, and Aster undermines it by resorting to kinetic weaponry when he needs a dramatic climax. Joe's ambulations around Eddington are punctuated by a dreary, claustrophobic home life: He shares a cramped, sepulchral house with his emotionally disturbed wife, Louise (Emma Stone), and her mother, Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell), who spends her days on the internet, 'doing her own research' on conspiracies ranging from Hillary Clinton's body double to covid as a plot hatched at Johns Hopkins.
It's convenient that Joe has asthma, which allows viewers to sympathize when he chooses not to wear a mask; he also has a Black deputy named Michael (Micheal Ward), which makes it equally convenient when a Black Lives Matter group forms in Eddington: Some of the film's most amusing moments involve loud, self-righteous protesters yelling at Michael to join them, forcing him to choose identities on the spot. Just about every modern-day scourge is name-checked in 'Eddington,' from passive-aggressive Zoom meetings, bitcoin and drone technology to AI, deepfakes and cynical #MeToo accusations. (Even the Gen Z stare gets a brief shout-out.)
When the revolution is Aster-ized, that means it's put into a blender of fear, bemusement, outrage and who-have-we-become mortification. Aster enlists a panoply of small-town characters to embody all that's gone wrong with American society over the past decade and a half — a strategy that begins to feel like a pageant of woozy straw men, stumbling in to introduce yet another breach of humanity and then disappearing (Austin Butler shows up in just such a cameo, as a creepy cult leader). 'Eddington' doesn't possess the sharp prescience of Mike Judge's 2006 parodic crystal ball 'Idiocracy,' nor does it pack the accusatory power of Michael Winterbottom's devastating pandemic ticktock, 2022's 'This England.' As a film, it offers neither illumination nor catharsis. Like Joe himself, it seems to float through reality rather than grasp it, detached from the world it seeks to bemoan.
The sanctimony, certainty, hypocrisy and, ultimately, destructive potential of moral arrogance are on full display throughout 'Eddington,' which purposefully doesn't take any explicitly partisan stances. This is a human-zoo exercise which, admittedly, can be entertaining but ultimately doesn't have much to offer by way of wisdom or insight. The characters all seem drawn from the same stacked deck: As the beleaguered Joe, Phoenix delivers one of his now-familiar recessive, grumbling performances as a man hoist on his own confidently noble petard (his political rhetoric is limited to criticizing the government for ruining people's days, and calling for 'freeing each other's hearts'). Stone is utterly wasted as Louise, who makes weird-looking dolls for weird-looking dolls' sake. Pascal's mayor is probably the movie's most vividly drawn figure, but like all his peers he exists in a world that feels like it's been filmed through algae-covered glass. For a movie drenched in foreboding in menace, there's very little narrative tension in 'Eddington,' a problem Aster solves with an intrusive sound design and dissonant, clanging piano chords.
As self-consciously bizarre as 'Eddington' is (would Aster have it any other way?), one look at current headlines about the Epstein files, now-official vaccine policies and chemtrail theories about the recent Texas floods suggests that the filmmaker's worries are nothing if not well-founded. We are going to hell, in a hand basket we're weaving ourselves, post by post, ping by ping.
Aster isn't wrong, but by the grotesque, Oedipally tinged conclusion of his cri de coeur, what might have been an energizing or at least enraging cautionary tale ends in a what-just-happened shrug. Let the bad times scroll, on and on.
R. At area theaters. Contains strong violence, some grisly images, language and graphic nudity. 148 minutes.