Eddington

Eddington (2025)
dir. Ari Aster
Rated: R
image: ©2025 A24

Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that Eddington is about our nation’s fractured, contentious response to the outbreak of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. It’s true that Ari Aster’s latest effort to unnerve us is set in May of 2020, during the heart of lockdown, mask mandates, and social distancing. Much of the picture’s action centers around a small New Mexico town’s mayoral race in which one candidate extols the virtues of coronavirus safety protocols, while the other lambasts those same protocols as an attack on personal freedom.

That’s all very effective window dressing for what Aster is really after, an examination of how our society functions – or, increasingly, how it fails to function – now that we all live on the internet. The terms extremely, chronically, and terminally online have been around since the mid-2010s, but this way of living became supercharged in 2020 because of those lockdowns.

Since then, we’ve only become more entrenched in experiencing reality via the internet.

Joe Cross, the sheriff of Eddington has asthma. That makes his aversion to wearing a mask at least understandable. But it’s not really about his medical condition. Joe resents being told what to do by the government.

Eddington’s mayor, Ted Garcia, who also owns a local bar, follows the New Mexico governor’s orders for lockdowns and mask mandates while running his mayoral reëlection campaign. Joe, in a fit of pique after a confrontation with Ted at a local grocery store, impulsively decides to throw his hat into the ring for mayor. He makes his announcement via a hastily recorded social media post.

Meanwhile, Ted’s teenaged son, Eric, is infatuated with Sarah, a young woman who is committed to social justice issues, and who spurs local protests in solidarity with the nationwide outrage sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Sarah briefly dated Michael, one of Joe’s deputies, who is a Black man. Sarah tries repeatedly to recruit Michael to the Black Lives Matter cause.

Aster, who excelled at staging supernatural horror among a tightknit family in Hereditary and human-fueled horror among a not-so-tightknit group of friends in Midsommar, excels in Eddington at capturing the interpersonal dynamics of the kind of small, rural town where everybody knows everybody else’s business. Joe’s wife, Louise, the daughter of the last sheriff – and in whose shadow her husband painfully resides – dated Ted briefly twenty years ago, another point of contention between the two men.

Louise struggles with anxiety and depression, a result of some unspoken trauma from her distant past. Her mother, Dawn, who has moved in with Joe and Louise due to COVID, is a conspiracy theorist who only breaks from talking about the planned-demic long enough to berate Joe for failing to live up to her dead husband’s legacy as sheriff.

Aster effectively shapes the character of Dawn – both in his screenplay and in how he and character actor Deirdre O'Connell collaborated to portray her on screen – as the internet personified. In every scene in which she appears, Dawn can be heard muttering incessantly to herself, and to anyone else who will listen, about the conspiracies that obsess her. She’s like a walking, talking doomscroll.

It’s a bit of a disservice to O’Connell, who does a fantastic job in the role, but my memory of the character distinctly leaves her face as a blur. I think that’s exactly as Aster intended. She is ever present, but in the way that a television turned on as background noise can be.

In an inspired bit of blocking and set design in one scene, Dawn is hidden from view behind the curtain of a set of sliding patio doors. In the foreground, Louise, who is in a state of agitation because of Joe’s actions, lies on her bed in the dark. Joe stands outside of the house, on the lefthand side of the frame, trying to convince his wife through the closed patio door to have dinner with him. On the other side of the somewhat sheer curtain covering the righthand patio door, we see the silhouette of Dawn, her indistinct ceaseless drone underlying Joe and Louise’s conversation.

In another sequence, Joe watches breaking news coverage on a TV while distracted by a social media feed on his phone. In Eddington, the characters’ attention is constantly under siege from multiple screens, much like many of us here in the real world.

The internet even reaches its tentacles into the physical world in the form of Vernon Jefferson Peak, a charismatic cult – and I use that term very specifically – social media star who uses his dubious claims about being abused as a child to lure vulnerable people into his orbit. Dawn convinces Louise to attend an in-person gathering organized by Peak, who insinuates himself into Louise’s life.

Underneath his thin veneer of care and concern for others, anyone with their head screwed on straight can see that Peak is really only concerned about himself. Aster exploits that essential human trait – always looking out for number one – by showcasing it in almost every single character in Eddington.

Joe won’t be told by anyone what he can and can’t do, even if it risks the health of others. Ted is happy to represent the people of Eddington, as long as it means money in his campaign coffers. (There’s a wonderful blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment that gives us a hint of who Ted really is, when the camera glides by a hoarded abundance of toilet paper in Ted’s home.) His campaign funds are supplied by wealthy investors looking to build an AI data center in the area. The data center’s operators, in turn, will siphon off the community’s water supply and is strongly opposed by the local indigenous population. Eric is down for the cause of social justice, if it will get him closer to the girl he fancies.

A still from Eddington.

All of the above makes this neo-Western seem completely bleak and depressing, but I was surprised by how laugh-out-loud funny Eddington is. Towards the end of the movie, Eric is delivering an impassioned speech to a crowd about racial justice. He makes the observation that, as a white person, it’s time for him to shut up and listen to what Black people have to say. And he’ll do that, he assures his audience, just as soon as he’s finished with his speech. A slogan on Joe’s sheriff-cruiser-cum-campaign-vehicle hilariously reads, “Your Being Manipulated.”

Eddington’s cast are all in sync with what Aster is doing; each one brings a wild-eyed fanaticism to their respective roles. My only quibble is with Joaquin Phoenix as Sheriff Joe. There’s a softness to Phoenix’s performance – as someone who grew up in a small-town, I can attest to the need for men in these settings to relentlessly perform their masculinity – that rings false.

Pedro Pascal, as Ted, continues to impress me with his range and deep understanding of his characters. Pascal’s real-life celebrity persona is one of a good-natured and empathetic person. He has spoken out for trans rights (the actor has a trans sister), and he uses his charm to disarm us, all the while hinting that Ted has his own ulterior motives.

As Joe’s trauma-stricken wife, Emma Stone stumbles around in a daze, like she’s recently walked off the set of a Yorgos Lanthimos shoot, which she very well might have done. Austin Butler steals the movie for a few precious minutes as the cult leader Vernon.

I was simultaneously impressed and annoyed by Aster and cinematographer Darius Khondji’s bold choice to shoot nighttime sequences with little-to-no conventional lighting. We’ve all had that moment of temporarily being taken out of a story when a character who should be shrouded in darkness inexplicably has three-point lighting cast on them. There is none of that in Eddington. The sunless sequences in the film are DARK. It was exhilarating to see the filmmakers try for real verisimilitude in this regard, but, at the same time, it was hard to make out some action because it was so poorly lit.

Because this is an Ari Aster movie, the last act becomes an orgy of violence and destruction. Joe’s reaction to a mentally unstable unhoused man – played by a completely unrecognizable Clifton Collins Jr. – unleashes the deluge when Joe stumbles upon the man in Ted’s bar. Under the surface of Joe’s rage is a commentary on our crumbling nation’s pathetic excuse for a social safety net. If we truly cared about people and not only profits in our sick society, this unhoused man would have been taken care of, instead of being left to wander the streets of Eddington.

And, as Eddington makes clear, this is how our rulers want it. The ownership class is willing to go to any lengths – as we see in the film’s final minutes – to take as much as they can for themselves while keeping everyone else under their control. Joe learns this the hard way, when he finds himself in an absolute waking nightmare in Eddington’s brief coda. If we continue to remain divided and fighting each other, which the fragmentation of the internet exacerbates, we have no chance of understanding who is really causing our suffering.

Why it got 4 stars:
- Ari Aster somehow took our collective experience during the worst of the COVID-19 crisis and turned it into an Ari Aster movie. Eddington is a film that contains layer upon layer about the current state of humanity that is bleak but somehow also hilarious.

Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- “Where’s your mask, Sheriff?” “I’m good.” As soon as this exchange happened, I knew we were all in for a bumpy ride.
- There’s a passing reference to Rio Rancho in Eddington; I’m assuming Aster is a Glengarry fan.
- The sequence in which Joe broadcasts his campaign platform from a bullhorn attached to his police cruiser brought to mind ole Hal Phillip Walker in Robert Altman’s Nashville.
- Aster astutely drops in a few references to verbiage that police departments use to silence critiques about police misconduct: namely the “bad apple” canard, blaming “excited delirium” whenever a person of color dies in police custody, and the moralizing handwringing about people of color “setting their own neighborhoods on fire.”
- The moment when Joe drives under a low tree branch and rips his roof-top campaign signage off of his cruiser is absolutely hilarious.
- Aster includes a scene late in the film in which Joe watches the 1939 John Ford movie Young Mr. Lincoln, starring Henry Fonda as Honest Abe. I found an intriguing breakdown of why Aster included the movie within his movie here.

Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I saw this with Rae at an early-evening weekday screening at Alamo Cedars with a handful of other people. I was definitely the one laughing the hardest at the movie. Rae began to wonder if I was OK…

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The FFC’s political soapbox

Fox News had to recently pay $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems for lying their asses off about the 2020 election being stolen. Newsmax has agreed to pay $67 million to the same company for telling the same lies. And yet, Fox News is still the number one rated cable “news” channel. At what point do we make the obvious observation that right-wing media can’t be trusted to tell the truth? The fire-breathing Kyle Kulinski excellently breaks down the situation even further here.