**This review contains spoilers**

How to even discuss this…? Eddington is an out-there movie from one of our top out-there directors right now. I’ve never seen an Ari Aster movie before despite their critical acclaim because he is first and foremost a horror director. So I was excited to finally get to see an Ari film because this one isn’t horror. Except, actually, I wouldn’t be so sure about that… I was surprised how many people were in the theater when I went to see it because it had been out for about a month. And also hadn’t performed that well critically or commercially. I really thought it would be just me in the theater, which sometimes I prefer. Maybe it was because I was in the East Village where the Ari Aster vibes are maybe more appreciated? Whatever the case, seeing this film with a crowd actually did help me to process it. The audience reactions gave me a stronger sense of the tone of the movie and a sample size for a general response to it. My personal response was this: it’s a razor sharp satire that nails everyone on both sides of every divide our country is currently facing. Every one of us is crazy and every one of us is dumb, no matter what you believe. It’s fascinating and funnier than I expected. But… the movie goes on for almost an hour too long and takes some really sharp left turns in the third act. I think it ends up being a case of the ideas are more interesting than the plot.

I wouldn’t even know how to begin to describe the story here. Technically, Eddington is about the desert city of Eddington, New Mexico during the COVID summer of 2020. The inciting incident happens when sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) decides to run for mayor against incumbent candidate, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Besides being mayoral race rivals, the two men have a longstanding personal conflict. Some have called the movie “the first modern Western”. The initial standoff between the adversaries shows a piece of litter blowing by like a tumbleweed and the film ends with a shootout on Main Street. But, really, the movie follows multiple characters dealing with different issues during a time period that felt like a boiling point in America. The COVID pandemic was a real-life inciting incident for a downward spiral of moral absolutism, paranoid conspiracy theories, divisive politics, and pandemic insanity that tore the country apart. 

Social media is a huge part of the movie. Many of the characters fall victim to “doomscrolling” and become wrapped up in the false realities of their phones. Social media was during this time, and still is, such a toxic place that just continues to feed you more and more of the kind of posts you interact with, creating an echo chamber of your own thoughts and removing any opposing views or anything outside of your own bubble. That’s incredibly dangerous. Especially as people fall deeper and deeper inside of these pocket universes full of misinformation. Enter the world of conspiracy. I am personally so anti-conspiracy theory. I just don’t understand it at all. I find it honestly weird and annoying when people believe some of the craziest things, like why do you even care? But it seems more prevalent than ever now that people are falling victim to the random bullshit they see online, and not only believing it, but letting it affect how they live their lives. Characters in this movie are quite literally brainwashed by ideas that seem so utterly absurd you want to laugh, until you realize real people in this world actually think and talk like this. The scenes of characters scrolling on TikTok or Facebook are so good. It’s so incredibly accurate (and funny, because it’s true) to what it’s like to be online these days. Coming from someone who spends much of her life and career on social media. The movie also visually portrays social media in an authentic way, including shots of scrolling social feeds and a TikTok video at the end that is shown horizontally so you have to tilt your head to read it. 

Setting a movie during COVID had some people asking, is it too soon? I don’t know. I think we still don’t have a definitive picture of how that time period affected us all personally and as a society and we probably won’t for a long time. But I don’t think it’s too soon to start examining it. I thought it might be triggering to go back to that time, and it was, but it was also funny to laugh at the absurdity of it. Joe Cross, the sheriff, is pretty much the only person in town who refuses to wear a face mask. He also has asthma. Much of his platform for his mayoral campaign involves the idea of being anti-mask and pro-personal freedom. With Joe as our main character, the film asks us to identify with him. But is it asking us to take his side? Or just showing us we can have empathy for someone with opposing views, as Joe is kind of a sad sack, walking mess? I’m not sure it’s either. I don’t know if there’s even an opinion or a message other than just showing us the irony of the person who is supposed to be enforcing the law being the one most openly defying it. I really thought the film would end with the ultimate irony of Joe dying from COVID, but it was naive of me to think I could have predicted where this was going. It does go for the ironic note, but in a much more twisted way. Joe is shot in the head in an attack by terrorists (I told you it took a turn) and survives, but is rendered severely disabled. After all this, he wins the mayoral race (his opponent was also killed so I’m sure that helped) and his office enforces all of the policies he campaigned on fighting against. And that, I do believe, is a commentary on our modern politics.

Politics plays a big part in the story as well, outside of the mayoral race. COVID was a politically fraught time in many ways. During the height of quarantine in 2020, we saw the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd. The movie tracks how protests began to pop up in cities across the country and eventually make their way to Eddington. The film never doubts the validity of the protests that rose up against the murder of George Floyd. But it does satirize the youth who joined the movement and the performative activism that goes along with “trending” causes. Another way social media is brought into the fold. One character, Brian, joins the BLM movement in Eddington to impress a politically active girl he has a crush on. In probably the funniest scene of the movie, we cut from a protest to Brian sitting at the dinner table with his parents, parroting phrases he’s learned from the group: “The goal should be to become white abolitionist, which is ‘changing institutions, dismantling whiteness and not allowing whiteness to reassert itself’. But we’re all basically light-years away from that.” After a long silence where his parents just stare at him, Brian’s father yells, “Are you fuckin retarded? You’re white.” He is, and so are the majority of Eddington’s BLM chapter. Ari Aster sees them as narcissists faking allyship for attention. They’re just more examples of the uptick in moralistic self-righteousness in America. The kicker for this storyline is that it ends with Brian shooting and killing a terrorist and being raised up as a folk hero for the right. He flips to becoming a MAGA influencer. From one extreme to another. It demonstrates how half the time these people who are extremely vocal faces of movements and causes and ideas don’t do it because they really believe in it. They just like the attention and they like to hear themselves talk. Brian says it himself when giving a speech in a public forum. After proclaiming that it’s time for white people to listen, he quickly follows that up with “Which I will be doing as soon as I finish this speech.”

It’s this injection of comedy into unfunny topics that makes Eddington so interesting and, honestly, enjoyable. It’s mostly a black comedy, with moments of conspiracy thriller. The tone is completely deadpan. Nothing is said with a wink, no one is trying to be funny. You laugh at the absurdity of it all… and then you stop when you realize it’s not a joke. This is our reality. But even just a moment like Joe crashing a fundraising party for Ted Garcia at his house has the added detail of the song “Firework” by Katy Perry blasting over the scene. The two end up fighting over the speaker as Joe unplugs it and Ted plugs it back in, causing the song to stop and start. The song choice is just so incompatible with the context of the scene, two middle-aged men acting like children under the guise of politics, that it’s so much funnier than it should be. The movie did get a lot of laughs in the theater. I’m glad the audience got the joke.

The cast of Eddington boasts some decent star power. Joaquin Phoenix is himself a pretty weird guy so I thought he was great as Joe, who is basically a walking mess. Pedro Pascal has gotten some flak for his acting lately but I thought he was really good too, albeit not in the movie as much as I thought he would be. Emma Stone also has barely any dialogue as Joe’s wife, Louise, but she’s such a pro, she says so much with just her face. Louise’s mom is played by Deirdre O’Connell who I recently saw on The Penguin. In both, she plays a grating, damaged mother figure and she does it well. Austin Butler plays a cult leader named Vernon Jefferson Peak and I would probably also fall for anything Austin Butler says, so that made sense to me.

The reviews for this movie weren’t just mixed. It was incredibly divisive. Which is so crazy to me. Like the movie or don’t, but to be morally or politically against it? It’s not that serious. It’s actually not serious at all. Or maybe it is. But you’re just proving the point of the movie that everyone has become an extremist. To say that the movie is “irresponsible“? That just shows a lack of media literacy. Just because significant, weighty topics are presented as laughable doesn’t mean they aren’t being taken seriously. Ari Aster is just trying to make a point. That’s what satire does. I think maybe the issue with the public’s reception lies with the fact that the movie does skewer absolutely everyone. It doesn’t take a side or have a clear political perspective. Instead, the message is that COVID and quarantine melted all of our brains. Our society, left, right, and middle, spun out of control and away from any grip on reality. The politics of it all is just a symptom of the larger problem, the collective trauma we experienced as a country.

So, like I said, this was my first Ari Aster movie because it was his first non-horror movie. Except it kind of 

2025 Count: 55 movies, 36 seasons of television, 4 specials