Review: Fear and loathing in ‘Eddington’
2025 / Dir. Ari Aster
☆ 4/5
“If you’re going to make a movie about America, you’ve got to have too many guns.” —Ari Aster in a post-screening Q&A
In Ari Aster’s new COVID-era, hysteria-western Eddington, cell phones appear to have overtaken shootouts and “Mexican standoffs” as the mechanism of frontier justice. That is until the guns finally come out following a ridiculous climactic confrontation between Joaquin Phoenix’s enfeebled Sheriff Joe Cross and Pedro Pascal’s Mayor Ted Garcia over a Katy Perry-related noise complaint.
After becoming a town icon resisting the May 2020 mask mandates at a local grocery store, Sheriff Cross takes up the cause of the common man while, in reality, channeling his internalized emasculation and incompetence as a lawman to try to unseat his town foe, Mayor Garcia — their tension a result of a years-long, largely one-sided beef caused by Mayor Garcia once having briefly dated Cross’s wife (Emma Stone).
Aster’s film is firmly rooted in the paranoia and social changes of the COVID and Black Lives Matter era, juggling black comedy and genuine fear of a town in which everyone is living in their own algorithm. Even in his own home, Cross’s crusade against stay-at-home rules seem to be existing in a different world than the wild QAnon-style conspiracy theories of his mother-in-law (Deirde O’Connell, playing another strain of Oedipal mothers often found in Aster’s movies) or the growing pedophilia obsession his shut-in wife, Louise, learns about from a Manson-esque online guru (Austin Butler) in between making creepy doll art. That’s not even including the overly earnest white teenagers who debate the meaning of anti-racism and the pros and cons of peaceful protest in the center of Eddington’s streets.
Eddington doesn’t overly take sides and isn’t interested in saying much about our fractured world, apart from the fact that contemporary American life will continue to lead to chaos and exploitation. Every character is a victim in some way of the system they live under and isn’t safe from criticism, which will either elicit laughter or anger from the audience.
What’s most striking about Eddington is that it’s firmly a genre film, with a tight narrative full of shocking twists, turns, shootouts, and explosions that keeps all of its many characters and perspectives contained in a way that Aster’s previous film, Beau is Afraid, struggled. It’s Fargo, but instead of goofy midwesternisms there are jokes about privilege and standing six feet apart.
Eddington ultimately wants us to look back five years ago and unpack what we collectively experienced. The film’s refusal to cast blame or provide solutions may not satisfy everyone, but its black comedy, creative use of western tropes, and genre thrills will make many remember a time that we tried to move on and forget, only to find we’re still trapped inside.
Watch if you like: No Country for Old Men, Team America: World Police, and listening to Alex Jones and Rachel Maddow at the exact same time while thinking about how much fun you had in March 2020.