At first, the most remarkable thing about Ari Aster’s Eddington is how unremarkable it is, especially for the director of Hereditary, Midsommar and Beau is Afraid. The opening half of Aster’s new movie is a realistic review of what we all went through in the first pandemic year, 2020, with only slightly enhanced versions of the micro and macro aggressions that blew up between people of different political valances: those who performed their commitment to the greater good by enforcing mask mandates, and those who performed their commitment to personal freedom by flouting such mandates. Eddington cleverly makes it unclear who was in the right and who was in the wrong, since we all looked pretty ugly back in those days that were also coloured by intense social justice protests – and not just because it had been three weeks since we’d washed our hair.

More miraculously, Eddington also marks the moment when we all might be ready for a nuanced consideration of the pandemic – might be finally ready for a movie that deals with COVID at all. Originally, films with pandemic subject matter were an inevitable byproduct of what creative people were dealing with at the time, a way to vent their frustration and also produce something relevant to audiences imprisoned in their homes. We responded to them because we were desperate and they spoke to our current reality. When those movies were no longer strictly necessary, though, we turned our heads in the other direction as violently as we could.

There’s a version of Eddington that does little more than shrewdly present us with a slightly skewed, slightly satiric version of these events, but Aster was never likely to make that version of Eddington. The version he did make, in its second half, very much resembles Hereditary, Midsommar and Beau is Afraid, specifically the heightened paranoia of the latter. That may be perfect for the ardent supporters of what Aster has done so far in his career, maybe not so much for those who were grooving on the more restrained Aster we get in the first half.

As in Beau, the star of Eddington is Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix plays Joe Cross, the sheriff of the fictitious New Mexico town of the title, who has been more or less going along with the new constraints of the pandemic, resigned to cooperation despite his eagerness to remove his mask whenever possible. This predeliction becomes a battle cry when he witnesses a maskless elderly man being roughly escorted out of the local supermarket because he can’t breathe properly while masked. The local mask mandates are embodied by the Eddington mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who already serves as a rival to Cross for preexisting reasons in their personal history. Now Cross makes it official as he throws his hat in the ring to oppose Garcia in the upcoming election.

It’s perhaps an inoppotune time for Cross to spontaneously begin a political career. All is not well on the home front. Cross is married to a woman, Louise (Emma Stone), who had suffered a nervous breakdown even prior to the pandemic. She’s currently on shaky ground as she is susceptible to the conspiracy theories of her mother (Deirdre O’Connell), who lives with them, and to a charismatic cult leader (Austin Butler) whose YouTube videos she falls asleep to. Cross has also got professional obligations to contend with as the local youth have taken the Black Lives Matter movement to the streets of Eddington, protesting a local police force that had been fairly benign, but may quickly be pushed in the other direction. It’s possibly enough to make a man snap.

Aster wisely determines we don’t need a full-on COVID satire at this stage. Judd Apatow already made such a movie in 2022 with The Bubble, which also starred Pascal, and which was not received well by most audiences and critics (though this one liked it). So the definite black comedy in this movie is less satirical in nature and more oddball confrontational. The scuffling of Cross and his various adversaries reflects the bent-out-of-shape way we all felt in May of 2020, and should resonate with viewers, who will find themselves nodding along regularly with this heightened version of that reality.

To describe the ways Eddington goes off the rails would be doing a disservice to Aster, but Beau is a Afraid makes a good litmus test to how you personally will receive it. While Eddington does not seem likely to divide viewers as much as Beau did — let’s be honest, most of us did not like that film — there are certainly elements that some will find hard to suffer. Others will give them the chef’s kiss. This really comes down to how much you go for the specific flavour of what Aster has brought to the cinema, though you don’t have to already be in Aster’s corner to appreciate Eddington, as it is significantly more accessible than Beau. (It would be hard to be less.)

Then again, a bit of exaggeration does underscore the slippage in our sanity that accompanied this part of our collective recent history. COVID was a time of exaggerations, and is perhaps best addressed by someone with Aster’s tendencies. Even if it doesn’t meet the standard he set in Hereditary and Midsommar, that’s more a commentary on the way Aster has announced himself in the last decade than it is on Eddington. 

 

Eddington is currently playing in cinemas.