I’ve read more than a few searing indictments about writer/director Ari Aster’s latest film, Eddington, an alienating and self-indulgent movie starring Joaquin Phoenix on the heels of his last alienating and self-indulgent movie starring Phoenix. It’s ostensibly billed as a “COVID-era Western,” and that is true, but it’s much more than that. I can understand anyone’s general hesitation to revisit this acrimonious time, but that’s where the “too early yet too late” criticism of others doesn’t ring true for me. It is about that summer of 2020 and the confusion and anger and anxiety of the time; however, I view Eddington having more to say about our way of life in 2025 than looking back to COVID lockdowns and mask mandates. This is a movie about the way we live now and it’s justifiably upsetting because that’s where the larger culture appears to be at the present: fragmented, contentious, suspicious, and potentially irrevocable.

Eddington is a small-town in the dusty hills of New Mexico, neighboring a Pueblo reservation, and it serves as a tinderbox ready to explode from the tension exacerbated from COVID. Sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix) has had it up to here with mask mandates and social distancing and the overall attitude of the town’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Joe decides to run for mayor himself on a platform of common-sense change, but nothing in the summer of 2020 was common.

Eddington is a movie with a lot of tones and a lot of ideas, and much like 2023’s Beau is Afraid, it’s all over the place with mixed results that don’t fully come together for a coherent thesis. However, that doesn’t deny the power to these indefatigable moments that stick with you long after. That’s an aspect of Aster movies: he finds a way to get under your skin, and while you may very well not appreciate the experience because it’s intentionally uncomfortable and probing, it sticks with you and forces you to continue thinking over its ideas and creative choices. It’s art that defiantly refuses to be forgotten. With that being said, one of the stronger aspects of Aster’s movies is his pitch-black sense of comedy that borders on sneering cynicism that can attach itself to everything and everyone. There are a lot of targets in this movie, notably conspiracy-minded individuals who want people to “do their own research,” albeit research ignoring verified and trained professionals with decades of experience and knowledge. There’s a lot of people talking at one another or past one another but not with one another; active listening is sorely missing, as routinely evidenced by the silences that accompany the mentally-ill homeless man in town that nobody wants to actively help because they see him as an uncomfortable and loud nuisance. For me, this is indicative of 2025, with people rapidly talking past one another rather than wanting to be heard.

When Aster is poking fun at the earnestness of the high school and college students protesting against police brutality, I don’t think he’s saying these younger adults are stupid for wanting social change. He’s ribbing how transparently these characters want to earn social cache for being outspoken. It’s what defines the character of Brian, just a normal kid who is so eager to be accepted that he lectures his white family on the tenets of destroying their own white-ness at the dinner table, to their decidedly unenthusiastic response. I don’t feel like Aster is saying these kids are phony or their message is misapplied or ridiculous or without merit. It’s just another example of people using fractious social and political issues as a launching point to air grievances rather than solutions. The protestors, mostly white, will work themselves into a furious verbal lather and then say, “This shouldn’t even be my platform to speak. I don’t deserve to tell you what to do,” and rather than undercutting the message, after a few chuckles, it came across to me like the desperation to connect and belong coming out. They all want to say the right combination of words to be admired, and Brian is still finding out what that might be, and his ultimate character arc proves that it wasn’t about ideological fidelity for him but opportunism. The very advancement of Brian by the end is itself its own indictment on white privilege, but you won’t have a character hyperventilating about it to underline the point. It’s just there for you to deliberate.

Along these lines, there’s a very curious inclusion of a trigger-happy group in the second half of the movie that blends conspiracy fantasy into skewed reality, and it begs further unpacking. I don’t honestly know what Aster is attempting to say, as it seems like such a bizarre inclusion that really upends our own understanding of the way the world works, and maybe that’s the real point. Maybe what Aster is going for is attempting to shake us out of our own comfortable understanding of the universe, to question the permeability of fact and fiction. Maybe we’re supposed to feel as dizzy and confused as the residents of Eddington trying to hold onto their bearings during this chaotic and significant summer of 2020.

I think there’s an interesting rejection of reality on display with Eddington, where characters are trying to square news and compartmentalize themselves from the proximity of this world. Joe Cross repeatedly dismisses the pandemic as something happening “out there.” He says there is no COVID in Eddington. For him, it’s someone else’s problem, which is why following prevailing health guidelines and mandates irks him so. It’s the same when he’s trying to explain his department’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests that summer in response to George Floyd’s heinous murder. To him, these kinds of things don’t happen here, the people of Eddington are excluded from the social upheaval. This is an extension of the “it won’t happen to me” denialism that can tempt any person into deluding ourselves into false security. It’s this kind of rationalization that also made a large-scale health response so burdensome because it asked every citizen to take up the charge regardless of their immediate danger for the benefit of others they will never see. For Joe, the tumult that is ensnaring the rest of the country is outside the walls of Eddington. It’s a recap on a screen and not his reality. Except it is his reality, and the movie becomes an indictment about pretending you are disconnected from larger society. It’s easier to throw up your hands and say, “Not me,” but it’s hard work to acknowledge the troubles of our times and our own engagement and responsibilities. In 2025, this seems even more relevant in our doom-scrolling era of Trump 2.0 where the Real World feels a little less real every ensuing day. It’s all too easy to create that same disassociation and say, “That’s not here,” but like an invisible airborne virus not beholden to boundaries and demarcations, it’s only a matter of time that it finds your doorstep too.

You may assume with its star-studded cast that this will be an ensemble with competing storylines, but it’s really Joe Cross as our lead from start to finish, with the other characters reflections of his stress. I won’t say that most of the name actors are wasted, like Emma Stone as Joe’s troubled wife and Austin Butler as a charismatic conman pushing repressed memory child-trafficking conspiracies, because every person is a reflection over what Joe Cross wants to be and is struggling over. Despite his flaws and some startling character turns, Aster has great empathy for his protagonist, a man holding onto his authority to provide a sense of connectivity he’s missing at home. Our first moment with this man is watching him listen to a YouTube self-help video on dealing with the grief of wanting children when your spouse does not. Right away, we already know there’s a hidden wealth of pain and disappointment here, but again Aster chooses empathy rather than easy villainy, as we learn his wife is struggling with PTSD and depression likely as a result of her own father’s potential molestation. This revelation can serve as a guide for the rest of the characters, that no matter their exterior selves that can demonstrate cruelty and absurdism, deep down many are processing a private pain that is playing out through different and often contentious means of survival. I don’t think Aster condones Joe Cross’ perspective nor his actions in the second half, but I do think he wants us to see Joe Cross as more than just some rube angry with lockdown because he’s selfish.

It’s paradoxical but there are scenes that work so splendidly while the movie as a whole can seem overburdened and far too long. The cinematography by the legendary Darius Khnodji (Seven, City of Lost Children) expertly frames and lights each moment, many of them surprising, intriguing, revealing, or shocking. There can be turns that feel sudden and jarring, that catapult the movie into a different genre entirely, into a Hitchcockian thriller where we know exactly what the reference point is that I won’t spoil, to an all-out action showdown popularized by Westerns. Beyond Aster’s general more-is-more preference, I think he’s dabbling with the different genres to not just goose his movie but to question our associations with those genres and our broader understanding of them. It’s not quite as clean as a straight deconstructionist take on familiar archetypes and tropes. It’s more deconstructing our feelings. Are we all of a sudden in a forgiving mood because the movie presents Joe as a one-man army against powerful forces? It’s all-too easy to get caught up in the rush of tension and satisfying violence and root for Joe, but should we? Is he a hero just because he’s out-manned? Likewise, with the conclusion, do we have pity for these people or contempt? I don’t know, though there isn’t much hope for the future of Eddington, and depressingly perhaps for the rest of us, so maybe all we have are those fleeting moments of awe to hold onto and call our own.

Eddington is an intriguing indictment about our modern culture and the rifts that have only grown into insurmountable chasms since the COVID-19 outbreak. It’s a Western in form pitting the figure of the law against the moneyed establishment, and especially its showdown-at-the-corral climax, but it’s also not. It’s a drama about people in pain looking for answers and connections but finding dead-ends, but it’s also not. It’s an absurdist dark comedy about dumb people making dumb and self-destructive decisions, but it’s also not. The paranoia of our age is leading to a silo-ing of information dissemination, where people are becoming incapable of even agreeing on present reality, where our elected leaders are drowning out the reality they don’t want voters to know with their preferred, self-serving fantasy, and if they just say it long enough, then a vulnerable populace will start to conflate fact and fiction. I don’t know what the solution here is, and I don’t think Aster knows either by the end of Eddington. I can completely understand people not wanting to experience a movie with these kinds of uncomfortable and relevant questions, but if you want to have a closer understanding of how exactly we got here, then Eddington is an artifact of our sad, stupid, and supremely contentious times. Don’t be like Joe and ignore what’s coming until it’s too late.

Nate’s Grade: B