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DIRECTED BY: Ari Aster
FEATURING: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Deirdre O’Connell, Cameron Mann, Micheal Ward, Matt Gomez Hidaka, Luke Grimes
PLOT: Spurred by his dislike of mask mandates and by personal animosity, an asthmatic sheriff in the tiny town of Eddington, NM runs for mayor, a decision that leads to a web of lies and violence and brings him into conflict with BLM protesters, antifa, and a pedophile-conspiracy cult.
COMMENTS: Come with Eddington and venture back in time to distant 2020, when a plague encompassed the Earth. Remember people’s noses constantly sliding out of their masks? Lining up to enter grocery stores spaced six feet apart? Conspiracists seizing upon citations of the word “coronavirus” from before 2019 as evidence of a “plandemic”? A swab roughly jammed up your nasal cavity at a drive-through testing clinic? Kids with assault weapons becoming YouTube celebrities? Banners hanging off cars bearing messages like “YOUR BEING MANIPULATED” [sic]? Incoherent anger and incipient violence in the air everywhere? It’s all here, in a cinematic memorial marking the moment America broke.
Eddington pits Joaquin Phoenix, a sheriff who commands little respect from his counterparts at the Pueblo tribal police, the populace at large, or even his own frigid wife, against Pedro Pascal, the incumbent mayor who’s cloyingly conciliatory in public, a hypocrite in private, and in bed with a data-center development, to boot. Phoenix’s impulsive plan to run for mayor against Pascal is the first of many poorly planned decisions. Things are complicated by incestuous love affairs in the town of about 2,000 lost souls. The politics of the wider world impinge on this microcosm in a sometimes humorous way; BLM protesters numbering in the dozens “block” Eddington’s main street, and a campaign rally at a Mexican restaurant draws even fewer folks. Still, although the political stakes are small, the body count will eventually be shockingly high.
Aster’s mockery is broad when it comes to the young privileged white kids too-eagerly radicalized by the Black Lives Matter movement—despite the fact that there is only one African American in this dusty hamlet, and he’s a policeman. The conservatives are treated with a bit more nuance. Sheriff Joe’s reluctance to mask up has a reasonable basis in asthma, and his wife and mother-in-law’s seductions into conspiracy culture are well-founded in mild mental illnesses greatly exacerbated by the stresses of lockdown. Aster makes every fevered scenario he dredges up from those dark days feel as crazy and relatable as it really was. The cast is excellent: Joaquin Phoenix stumbles and follows a gut feeling that always leads him astray, Pedro Pascal plays perhaps his least likable character, melancholy Emma Stone mopes in bed until she finally breaks. And, although it is not a particularly weird movie for most of its running time, the climax gets wild and disorienting, as Aster puts Phoenix through misfortunes and anxieties recalling Beau at his most fearful. No one comes out of this experience unscathed; the survivors all suffer from long Covid.
Had Eddington been made in 2015, it would have played like an outlandish satire in the vein of Southland Tales. Coming in 2025, it seems almost like a story you dimly remember scrolling past on your Instagram feed.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
Another way to enhance what little entertainment that can be squeezed out of this lesson in masochism is to locate the the slivers of other films embedded in it: King of Comedy, Taxi Driver (cue the 
,” his seventh novel, in 2009. Although they sell well and have cult followings, no Pynchon novel had previously been adapted for the screen, mainly because the author’s plots are too complex and confusing to fit the film format. Anderson had considered adapting “V” or “Mason & Dixon,” but found both impossible to translate into a coherent screenplay.