The first truly modern American Western, or at least the first one that has the nowness required to mention Pop Crave by name, Ari Aster’s “Eddington” is also the first major Hollywood movie that’s been willing to see the COVID pandemic for the hellacious paradigm shift that it was — as the moment when years of technologically engineered polarization tore a forever hole in the social fabric of a country that was already coming apart at the seams.
Few other filmmakers would have the chutzpah required to make a “No Country for Old Men” riff that hinges on mask mandates and the murder of George Floyd, and we should probably all be grateful that none of them have tried. But Aster, who’s exclusively interested in making the kind of films that should be reviewed straight onto a prescription pad, is too beholden to his neuroses for his latest movie to play like a cheap provocation. This time, however, there’s a good chance those are your neuroses, too.
Stemming from a collective sickness to the same degree that “Beau Is Afraid” was born from some very personal trauma, “Eddington” — the tagline for which reads: “Hindsight is 2020” — only wields its what’s the opposite of nostalgia? specificity as a means to an end. It might set the scene with a little “remember how it felt to wait in line outside the pharmacy?” fun, but Aster’s bleakly funny and brilliantly plotted assessment of how fucked we’ve become since then soon leverages those fun memories into a far more probing story about the difficulties of sharing a town between people who live in separate realities.
If “Eddington” is still a discourse generation machine powerful enough to make “Civil War” seem like a wind-up toy by comparison, that isn’t because it picks sides — or risks the navel-gazing tedium of Alex Garland’s epic by explicitly refusing to. Virtually everyone in Aster’s COVID Western is a victim to one extent or another, even if some of them have a lot more blood on their hands by the end of it than others; there’s no need for false equivalencies in a film whose characters are all powerless to disentangle the internet from the fabric of their personal lives.
That includes Sheriff Joe Cross (a sublimely pathetic Joaquin Phoenix), who only goes online under extreme duress, and always seems to unholster his phone as if he’s begging someone not to make him use it. The impotent face of law enforcement in a small New Mexico town that’s home to about 2,000 people, Joe is a “common sense” conservative who just wants to make babies and mess around with his government-appropriated AR-15.
He’s trying to make peace with the fact that his QAnon-susceptible wife Louise (Emma Stone) would rather watch numerology videos on YouTube than acknowledge her husband’s existence, but Eddington’s mask-happy mayor Ted — a handsome tech entrepreneur (Pedro Pascal) who secretly intends to host a massive artificial intelligence datacenter on the outskirts of Eddington after he wins re-election — is in thrall to the state’s liberal governor, and his political career hinges on enforcing their various COVID mandates.
That doesn’t sit well with the asthmatic Joe, who doesn’t consider the coronavirus to be a “here” problem, in much the same way as he later tries to wave off the idea that Eddington is a microcosm of the structural racism and class inequalities that people begin to protest on Main St. after police execute a man in St. Louis. Everyone in his jurisdiction is getting their news from a different source, and tensions are spilling into the supermarket aisles as people struggle to find a common harmony amid the noise of their competing echo chambers.
Hell, even the people in Joe’s house are getting their news from different sources, especially since his live-in mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell as Dawn) has started force-feeding Louise videos by a far, far right-wing YouTuber who tells his subscribers that “your pain isn’t a coincidence.” He’s played by a smooth and shaggy Austin Butler, and you’d probably want to believe him too.
What’s a sheriff to do? In Joe’s case, he decides to run against Ted for mayor, and that decision will ultimately have a massive ripple effect on everyone in town, from the deputies he enlists to run his harebrained campaign (Luke Grimes and Michael Ward, whose competing ambitions assume a racial dynamic in the wake of Black Lives Matter), to a horny white teenager who transforms himself into the wokest kid alive to impress his politically active crush. Alas, Googling Angela Davis may not be enough to seal the deal in a society where the internet — that great connector — has made it impossible for people to communicate with each other, and the reality of that situation only grows increasingly unmanageable as national headaches begin to impose themselves on a town where everyone sees their neighbors as a problem to be solved.
Aster has described “Eddington” as a Western with cell phones instead of guns, but the guns do eventually come out; no one familiar with the director’s previous work will be shocked to learn that this movie doesn’t end with a raucous but rousing civil assembly. The more that Aster’s latest freakout begins to resemble an apocalyptic kumbaya about the need for non-partisan communication, the more gleefully he obliterates any hope of restoring a shared reality between his characters (case in point: The story’s first act of profound violence immediately follows a showdown that’s soundtracked by Katy Perry’s “Firework”).
The stakes escalate with a mordant velocity reminiscent of Park Chan-wook’s revenge sagas, a point of reference that continues through the darkly funny — and patently absurd — coda that Aster tacks on to the end of his film’s pulse-pounding final shootout. Like so many aspects of “Eddington,” the way that shootout resolves might easily be mistaken for cynicism if not for the script’s increasingly fever-brained insistence that its characters are at the mercy of a power beyond their control (not to double back to “Civil War,” but I hope everyone’s ready for another take on “The Antifa Massacre”).
Technology isn’t always at the forefront of this story, but Aster is unsparing about the ambient role it continues to play in our lives, and the further that our dear Sheriff Joe falls off the rails, the more that “Eddington” revels in the constructed nature of his reality (an opportunity that Daniel Pemberton’s Tōru Takemitsu-like score takes full advantage of). For a movie so giddy about grabbing hold of the third rail, Aster’s fourth feature is less effective as a shock to the system than it is for how vividly — and how uncomfortably — it captures the day-to-day extent to which our digital future has stripped people of their ability to self-identify their own truths.
John Ford’s “Young Mr. Lincoln” makes a cameo appearance towards the end, but “Eddington,” for all the inspiration it takes from the masters of its genre, feels equally indebted to the likes of Miranda July’s “Me and You and Everyone We Know” in how it takes stock of our divided online world, and pleads with everyone to “free each other’s hearts.” That film ended by reforging the human connection between people. This one ends with target practice.
Grade: A-
“Eddington” premiered in Competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. A24 will release it in theaters on Friday, July 18.
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