Ari Aster has always made films that resist comfort. He delights in pulling the rug from beneath us, not just in terms of story but in our very expectations of cinema. "Hereditary" and "Midsommar" made grief and ritualistic violence operatic, while "Beau Is Afraid" tested patience by refusing to settle into anything recognisable. With "Eddington," Aster has delivered something that feels at once familiar in his trajectory and yet even more divisive: a sprawling, cynical satire disguised as a western, where the pandemic lingers as a ghost and America’s cultural fractures are pried open for examination. It is audacious, often incisive, and sometimes flat-out infuriating.
Set in a dusty New Mexico town in the early months of Covid, Eddington never explicitly makes the virus its subject. Instead, it leaves it simmering on the periphery, a constant hum of anxiety shaping the collective mood. Masks, mandates, and paranoia hang in the background, pressing down on every exchange. Aster is clever enough not to dramatise the pandemic directly but instead allows its presence to expose cracks in civic life: mistrust in authority, the rise of misinformation, and the social media culture wars that fed on the fear. This quiet backdrop may be the film’s most truthful stroke, a reminder that the real terror of that time was not just the disease itself but how easily the social fabric unraveled in its shadow.
At its centre is Sheriff Joe Cross, played with brute detachment by Joaquin Phoenix. Cross is less a character than an embodiment of everything broken in American law enforcement—reactionary, incompetent, steeped in a false sense of authority. Watching him stumble through crises, manipulating situations he barely understands, is both darkly funny and deeply unsettling. He is a grotesque mirror of what happens when power collides with ignorance, and in Aster’s framing, he feels less like a man than a warning of what the children of digital outrage might one day become when given real authority. Cross is not a lawman; he is a symptom.
Around him swirls a town poisoned by performance. Young people weaponise social justice rhetoric for clout, turning what should be principled action into trends, hashtags, and witch hunts. Their activism is hollow, distorted through the lens of virality, stripped of empathy and reduced to competitive outrage. What should be a fight for equality becomes a scramble for the loudest megaphone. It is here that the film feels most cutting, holding a mirror to a generation that has inherited immense access to information but little in the way of wisdom to wield it. Aster skewers not just one side of the cultural divide but the entire machinery of a society addicted to spectacle and incapable of self-reflection.
Yet for all its sharpness, Eddington is also a mess. It drifts between satire, western, horror, and comedy, never fully committing to one. Its tonal shifts are often jarring rather than invigorating. The slow pace, which in Aster’s earlier films allowed dread to accumulate like smoke in a locked room, here feels slack, drained of momentum. What might have been hypnotic instead risks monotony, not helped by the fact that not a single character is written to be likeable or even particularly compelling. A film can survive unlikable characters if it offers something else—mystery, atmosphere, catharsis—but Eddington often offers only cynical repetition.
This problem is amplified by the waste of its formidable ensemble. Emma Stone, Austin Butler, and Pedro Pascal appear as satellites to Phoenix’s sheriff, but their presences are underutilised to the point of anonymity. Their star power, their charisma, their particular talents—none of it is meaningfully employed. They feel interchangeable, their roles more like sketches of archetypes than flesh-and-blood people. It is a strange creative choice: to gather some of the most magnetic actors working today only to drain them of everything that makes them so.
The film’s cynicism is relentless. Its satire is sharp but heavy-handed, its metaphors rarely subtle. Where Aster once balanced despair with moments of humanity, here he allows bitterness to dominate the screen. It is mean-spirited, intentionally so, and that makes it difficult to endure. And yet, this cruelty may also be its point. Watching Eddington is not enjoyable, nor is it designed to be. It leaves you hollow, agitated, repelled. But perhaps that reaction is precisely the mirror Aster wants us to confront—that we are so eager to reject the discomfort because it implicates us, because it refuses to let us escape our own complicity in the failures of that era.
Still, there is a fine line between challenging your audience and alienating them, and Eddington too often stumbles into the latter. It has the ingredients of something brilliant: the bleak wit, the genre-bending ambition, the fearless social critique. But the execution is uneven, the experience wearying, the aftertaste sour in ways that feel less illuminating than exhausting. One walks away not reeling, but shrugging, trying to shake it off—though perhaps that shrug is the most damning reaction of all, proof of just how numbed we’ve become to our own dysfunction.
In the end, "Eddington" is both vital and flawed. It may well be Aster’s most divisive work, not because it fails to see clearly but because it sees too clearly and too coldly. It is not a film that entertains, nor one that seeks to comfort. It is a wound held open, a diagnosis without remedy, a satire so laced with venom it burns through its own skin. If it leaves a sour taste, maybe that is deliberate. Maybe we are meant to sit with that bitterness, because maybe—just maybe—we are the problem, and Aster refuses to let us look away from that... us... and what we contribute to crisis.
7.5/10
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