Ari Aster apparently intends to not only touch but jump all over the third rail of American society, given the newly released first trailer for A24’s Eddington, which you can view below. Set in 2020, the ensemble film describes itself as a black comedy revolving around the COVID-19 pandemic in a small New Mexico city, a chamber piece that sees various members of town society collide against each other in the sort of red-vs-blue political chaos we all remember all too well from not just five years ago, but five minutes ago. The brief, official synopsis is as follows: “In May of 2020, a standoff between a small-town sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and mayor (Pedro Pascal) sparks a powder keg as neighbor is pitted against neighbor in Eddington, New Mexico.”
Suffice to say, Eddington is all but assured to piss off a whole lot of people on any conceivable side of the American political spectrum, which no doubt must be what Aster, the director of Hereditary and Midsommar, has in mind. He reunites with Phoenix as his muse after 2023’s surreal Beau is Afraid, joined by other ensemble members that include Emma Stone, Austin Butler, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O’Connell, Micheal Ward and Clifton Collins Jr. The screenplay is reportedly quite bloody and violent, as tensions in the town of Eddington spill over into widespread chaos.
The question of good taste on the part of Aster and A24 will clearly be impossible to ignore on this one. Mining any kind of humor, even in the form of satire or macabre acknowledgement of our shared, tragic experience, is going to be a no-go from a hell of a lot of people. Lest we forget, more than 1 million Americans died as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and many are still mourning lost loved ones. Nor has the virus somehow disappeared–it’s still infecting people and adding to its death toll to this day, albeit not generating the kind of headlines it once did. Aster’s film will no doubt be attempting to highlight some kind of universal truth about the experience we lived, although one wonders if it’s too soon to get much value from it, with a tagline like “hindsight is 2020.” Looking at the teaser trailer below, however, it does perfectly capture the depressingly common feeling of doomscrolling on social media as it still exists to this day. Given the creative team here, we would expect a deeply anxious, hard-to-watch evisceration of both American pop-cultural and political society.
If that’s not too traumatic an idea, you can check out the first footage of Eddington and its impressive ensemble cast below. The film will premiere at Cannes, and is scheduled to hit U.S. theaters on July 18, 2025.
