Eddington's Bleak Fantasy Bemoans a Nation in its Death Throes

Listen to this article

Ari Aster’s latest film, Eddington, is a divisive film about a divided Nation. Excoriating and exhilarating in equal measure, it is the first truly great movie to deal explicitly with the unique madness and malice that the global pandemic revealed, a kind of touchstone for a time and place that with only a few years remove feels at once as fictional and otherworldly as a sci-fi novel, and at the same time the very real-world harbinger of the political shifts that proceeded.

At the Hereditary premiere back in 2018 at Sundance’s Egyptian Theatre showcasing Aster’s debut, I can attest the audience shared an electric feeling of excitement about the discovery of a new and unique talent, one unafraid to mine genre conventions of the past while very much making them his own. His follow-up, Midsommar, borrowed heavily from a litany of other folk-horror tales, and once again its stylishness and effectiveness trumped any concerns about redundancy, though it did feel a bit more bloated than his taut earlier effort. Aster’s third film was more ambitious and more deeply flawed, with Beau is Afraid proving to be a maximalist, ungainly exploration of madness that overstayed its welcome by almost half its running time. With Beau, the feeling for this fan was one of deflation, finding an artist who was losing his way in favor of self-indulgence.

It is through a lens of trepidation that I screened Eddington, and certainly my dramatically lowered expectations may have helped satisfy this time around. All cynicism about the artistic project aside, I was completely enraptured by the film, solidly along for its tortuous yet exceptional ride.

Most Popular

Eddington provides another genre mélange, locking onto elements that equally fascinate the likes of the Coen brothers who, admittedly, tend to use a scalpel rather than Aster’s chainsaw to make their equally acidic takes. The Coens are masters of the blackly comedic travails of hapless individuals lost in mayhem of their own making, and tonally it’s this element that is built upon, with Aster approaching things in an even more vitriolic way, managing to burst the syphilitic sores of American society.

The writer/director prods at performative liberalism and conservative epistemological fallacies alike, as well as setting his gaze upon cultish delusions, the pornographic obsession with firearms treating a single constitutional amendment like a biblical testament, the simmering violence of political power, and even the territorial complexities between settler and the colonized that defines the American experiment.

Heady stuff, to be sure, but somehow in this mélange of madness Aster manages to pull it all off. Much of that success has to do with a pitch-perfect performance by Joaquin Phoenix, providing a mix of rage and emotional impotence not fully explored since a similarly effective take in The Master.

Phoenix plays Joe Cross, a man fittingly named after an ancient device of state-sponsored punitive torture who serves as the hapless sheriff of Eddington, New Mexico. With state-mandated lockdowns in place, his decision to go maskless is treated as an act of defiance by an officer of the law, pitting him in direct opposition to the town’s charismatic mayor/bar owner Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal).

Cross suffers from asthma, making his claims of not being comfortable while wearing a surgical mask slightly more palpable. This defiance provides a sardonic allusion to what’s to come narratively when the central characters learn about the death of George Floyd and his own unanswered cries about not being able to breathe. It’s these ironically twinned elements of that time period, two sides of a same, tarnished coin, that will make the film energizing, timely and delightfully provocative for some, risible, infantile and insulting for others.

Emma Stone plays Louise, Joe’s wife who is emotionally catatonic and physically distant due to past traumas. She and Joe are forced to share their locked-down home with her mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), a woman whose hobby is to delve into the darker regions of internet search results, spewing overtly laughable falsehoods expressed with the evangelism of the newly converted and the persistence of an addict.

Joe’s two deputies, Guy (Luke Grimes) and Lodge (Clifton Collins Jr.) soon get cajoled into serving as campaign staffers to buttress Cross’ political ambitions, an overt challenge to Garcia’s reign that echoes deeper fissures between the two men as secrets that have shaped Louise’s life boil up to the surface. When a spiritual guru (Austin Butler) sought out by Dawn arrives into their life, things on the home front shatter even further, resulting in escalation of conflict between the sheriff and mayor that eventually devolves in ways that border on the preposterous, and yet entirely predictable given the locale in which the film is set.

It’s in the unrelenting finale that Aster’s maximalist tendencies are once again unleashed, but unlike the unhinged Beau that slips off its rails, there remains a taut control even as the chaos reigns that makes for a far superior vision. The end result is deeply nihilistic, of course, but not in an empty or easily digestible way, taking a bemused rather than detached look at these various competing forces that are shaping the ideas and behaviors of these characters. Some elements are left masked and anonymous, but even there the hints of larger conspiratorial elements that could easily come across as deus ex machina are more the kind of accidentally truthful prophesies that oracles have long relied upon, where the paranoid are in fact sometimes right to have their suspicions raised.

Eddington is a cracked mirror held up to this period of American political and social life, and in a myriad ways the film shows that things are found wanting upon examination. The situations are contemporary, but the gulf that divides has always been there, the suspicions and superstitions that are baked into the very fabric of the Nation since its founding, fissures that are exposed in unsettling ways. This is a land where there are gulfs between people socially, politically, and economically, where a disparate population must tell themselves stories in order to form some semblance of connection out of supposedly shared ideals. The film exposes this façade, illustrating the collective delusion of community that with the smallest of prodding can readily collapse, the tinniest spark setting aflame the fuel that’s long been waiting to burn.

Eddington is a bleak fantasy, a cry in the dark, which for some that choose to confront its truths will be considered traitorous or even seditious, dancing on the grave of a dying democracy. It is also a sickly comedy, obsidian in its blackness, as morbid and compelling as the rictus of a skull smiling back as one contemplates their own inevitable downfall. The film is decidedly anti-cathartic, but despite its unrelenting nature and bleak worldview, it manages, implausibly, to be highly entertaining.

Eddington ain’t a town for everyone, serving as a slap in the face that’s both violent and comedic in ways that echo one of the film’s more unabashedly silly moments. The movie showcases the death rattle of the e pluribus unum myth, doing so while simultaneously suffocating any spark of hope along the way. Despite or perhaps because of its unrelenting nature, this latest film is surely Aster’s finest, firmly establishing his control of craft, blending his most brash tendencies with a welcome focus on what truly connects us, for good and for ill.

Director: Ari Aster
Writer: Ari Aster
Stars: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O’Connell, Micheal Ward, Austin Butler, Emma Stone
Release date: July 18, 2025

Jason Gorber is a Toronto based film Critic and Journalist, Editor-in-Chief at That Shelf, the movie critic for CBC’s Metro Morning, and others. He is a member of the Toronto Film Critics Association and voter for the Critics Choice Awards Association. He also knows for a fact that CASINO is Scorsese’s masterpiece, and has a cat named Zissou.

Eddington‘s Bleak Fantasy Bemoans a Nation in its Death Throes