While Ari Aster’s last film “Beau is Afraid” (2023) is deeply disturbing for its surrealism, his latest, “Eddington” (2025), is disturbing for the opposite reason –it is a painfully accurate reproduction of a time we all experienced, and many of us would like to forget.
You guessed it: 2020.
Aster’s last two films depart completely from the horror roots that earned him the loyal fan base he has today. Fans of “Hereditary” (2017) and “Midsommar” (2019) should rid themselves of any expectations when they enter the theater to see “Eddington”, as it is an experiment in an entirely different genre. It has been described as a dark comedy, a western or a political satire. Whichever descriptor you choose, know that this is not simply “a movie about COVID.”
The pandemic is indeed present in the film, but it is far from the focus “Eddington” depicts.
When a mask mandate in the small town of Eddington, New Mexico is enforced, Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) disobeys the authority of Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and walks into the local supermarket unmasked. This sparks a standoff between the two, reminiscent of Clint Eastwood era westerns, that largely perpetuates the story’s motion.
Joe’s anger inspires his decision to start his own mayoral campaign, running against the incumbent Ted, setting the grounds for their continuously evolving feud.Though it is something COVID-related that initiates the political conflict, 2020 and all the events that go with it function merely as the film’s backdrop, rather than the main content. Aster picks no sides and makes no statements.
This is an incredibly smart move. For one thing, “Eddington” is largely about America’s polarization. If Aster wrote this film with good guys, bad guys and a clear character to root for, it would only contribute to further polarization. He portrays Ted’s lukewarm progressive politics and Joe’s live-free-or-die push for mayor as equally flawed. Aster’s film is about the problem of divisiveness itself –it is not an attempt to solve it.
And why should it be?
This might seem like a centrist film in which Aster takes a holier-than-thou “BOTH SIDES WERE CRAZY!” approach. But it is not even that – that would be a lazy path to go down, and Aster is far from a lazy filmmaker. The film instead zooms out completely and avoids making any serious judgement on either the right or left.
Yes, there are jokes made about both sides: on the right, Joe’s homemade campaign vehicle is plastered with signs riddled with grammatical errors (“YOUR BEING MANIPULATED,” for example). On the left, we see two teenage boys at a Black Lives Matter protest, demonstrating insincerity, only present to impress the local activist whom both boys have a crush on. The punchline is that the girl’s involvement is performative, too. She is only there to virtue signal for Instagram.
But again, there are differences between jokes and judgements. Joe’s COVID skepticism is not played for laughs. A lesser film would present him as the story’s great fool, a raging MAGA lunatic. In “Eddington,” however, the viewer is encouraged to empathize with the fact that he sees something tremendously wrong with the world, and he is doing what he genuinely believes to be an effective way to fix it.
Instead of focusing on the politics, the protests or the pandemic, the focus is on regular people dealing with regular issues (emphasis on “regular”).
Joe’s wife Louise (Emma Stone), for example, is mentally ill due to some nebulous trauma she experienced in her childhood. The isolation of lockdown leads her down social media rabbit holes filled with QAnon-adjacent conspiracies that eventually result in her meeting a cult leader and ostensible predator, Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler). Though this plotline does not give Stone and Butler the screentime their talent deserves, it strongly dives into the effects that social media echo chambers have on people, and the dangers they cause.
The humor of this film is not to be understated. There was laughter throughout the theater, even in the film’s darkest moments. Aster holds a mirror up to all Americans, forcing us to laugh at the mistakes we remain appalled at. This film straddles the line between humorous and deeply unsettling, building the tension to edge-of-your-seat levels, diffusing it with moments worthy of belly laughs, and then building it up again until it erupts in the film’s explosive final half hour.
A movie set in 2020 begs the question: Too soon?
Nope. Just in time.