Publication Date: 07-19-2025

Eddington (2025) review

Dir. Ari Aster

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★

“A lot of you gonna get killed playin’ both sides.” – Plies, “Hot N**** (P-Mix)“

America has been in an awful way since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The country is embarrassingly divided, to the point where people appear to live in different realities depending on what kind of political diet they consume. Our monosyllabic reality TV tyrant president governs on the principles of fascism, ignorance, paranoia, and anti-intellectualism, all while the average family feels squeezed to death by rising prices and perennially stagnant wages.

If you asked filmmaker Ari Aster, the mind behind impressive multi-genre works like Hereditary and Midsommar, about all of this, I assume he’d say “everybody is equally crazy!” At least, that’s the message of his latest, Eddington, a truly modern Western set during the early months of the pandemic. This is a picture made with a glib neutrality, refusing to offer any commentary on the storm in which we’re still living. Aster takes aim at various subjects, but feels so far away from the target with most.

In Aster’s latest, the tiny town of Eddington, New Mexico (Pop. 2,634) is coming apart at the seams. Trying to bring some social order amidst mask mandates and six-foot distancing is Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), a pitiful creature who balks at the necessity of using PPE due to his asthma. Joe lives with his layabout wife, Louise (Emma Stone), and conspiracy theorist mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell). Louise has a complicated history with the town’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), as does Cross, who makes the spur-of-the-moment decision to unseat him as the leader of Eddington.

Joe runs his campaign on an anti-mask platform that decries “Your Being Manipulated!” [sic], for the pandemic was the beginning of the era when people used ignorance as a weapon of empowerment. Nobody in Eddington has been diagnosed with COVID-19, which Joe believes will give him some credibility against his liberal political rival. But like many of Aster’s throughline’s in his strange, cultish worlds, Joe is a mental weakling, who becomes obsessed with the ideal of obtaining power, and becomes increasingly desperate to secure his victory in the mayoral race.

By design, Eddington says very little about any of the chaos that occurred during the pandemic. The film awkwardly uses the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police as a plot-point, turning his camera on protestors and making them out to be ignorant. One young kid is simply in it to get laid and gain some online clout. Another young woman is in it for selfish reasons as well. Aster serves up the worst, most caricatured tendencies of all parties in a way that feels remarkably disingenuous to everyone. To put COVID-19 conspiracists on the same playing field with those protesting human rights violations immediately reveals that you have nothing meaningful to add to the discourse. Part of this passive centrism is what got us into this mess in the first place.

Not to mention, Aster’s approach makes any sociological observations about individuals a near-impossibility. Sure, the film adopts the kind of impressionism that allows you to make of the images what you will. However, in a good movie, like Alex Garland’s Civil War, such impartiality is addressed by the fact that the group of photojournalists the film follows grapple with the inherent subjectivity of their work. They choose what to capture. They choose what’s worth documenting, and that makes their job harder, believe it or not. Aster cruises around Eddington, spending some time on each street to get a feel for what kind of lockdown-induced craziness is taking place before heading in the opposite direction to document something else, content with saying nothing about his observations.

Also surprising is this is Aster’s first film where he gets little out of his marquee performers. Joaquin Phoenix’s umpteenth riff on the fragile and pathetic middle-aged man feels wearier this time. Perhaps after seeing him so helplessly incompetent in Beau is Afraid, that was just going to be an inevitability. Emma Stone is given little to do, as Aster struggles with making her an integral part of the story. Also underutilized is Austin Butler, a radical cult leader with a proclivity for drawing reactions, who slowly wins over Stone’s Louise. There’s a scene that suggests some traumatic depth to Louise that, of course, involves a heated discussion over pedophilia, but like most of Eddington, it holds little value in the long run. Aster would probably rather you remember the bizarre use of Katy Perry’s anthemic song “Firework” when Joe infiltrates a campaign party for Garcia.

It’s very true that the lockdowns brought forth by the pandemic effectively created a society that’s far more reactionary and paranoid on top of being isolated. We are creatures who now take comfort in our own little safe-spaces and schisms that the online world affords us. Aster at least seems fascinated by the proliferation of how individuals view “their” reality as the reality, but he can’t be bothered to dig into anything, be it the Black Lives Matter movement or internet grifters and afford his examination any true substance. The final act shifts into full Western sensibilities, but also plays like a redux of No Country for Old Men, so derivative and unsatisfying that not even Darius Khondji’s cinematography can rescue it.

Like the pandemic itself, Eddington keeps going, going, and going. This is provocation without a purpose. Compounding its start-stop pacing and inert themes is the fact that it’s an indulgently long 148 minutes. For his next film, Aster not only is in need of a clearer direction but a brutally honest editor.

My review of Hereditary (2018)
My review of Midsommar
My review of Beau is Afraid

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Austin Butler, Luke Grimes, Michael Ward, and Deirdre O’Connell. Directed by: Ari Aster.