Ari Aster’s ‘Eddington’ Watches America Collapse With Brilliant Indifference [Cannes 2025 Review]
Ari Aster is no longer cocooning. When the auteur initially emerged with the arguably, somewhat traditional horrors of Hereditary and Midsommar, audiences, myself included, may have confused the stress and anxiety of his earlier works with the excitement of recognizable genre.
With Eddington, his fourth feature, once again released by A24 (the house he arguably built), Aster’s terrible, scaly wings have finally pierced through the crust of his creative cocoon. What has emerged is a creature blindly cruel, excruciatingly funny, and, as you might imagine, deeply disturbed. A beast of chaos, unimaginable in shape, metaphorically Lovecraftian in nature, and at last, fully formed.
While his previous feature, Beau Is Afraid, experimented with existing beyond category, Eddington does so with evil confidence. This is not truly a COVID story, so don’t worry. Instead, this is a film that uses COVID as its brilliantly understated catalyst. The pandemic is merely the small, golden straw that broke the camel’s back, allowing the mask of America’s decency to slip. What’s revealed is the rotting flesh on the face of the phantom it’s been turning into for so, so long.
With Eddington, Aster acts as a terrible yet indifferent winged Outer God. He peers down at the fall of the American Empire at the precise moment our ankle turned and we came crashing into the inevitable hellscape we were always destined to find ourselves in. That moment? The year 2020.
The film is set in a small border town in New Mexico. A local sheriff named Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) and Ted, the town’s progressive mayor (Pedro Pascal), find themselves at odds at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Joe, a cop in a cowboy hat who refuses to wear a mask in the grocery store, is thankfully not reduced to caricature. Aster and Phoenix imbue him with enough softness and pathetic confusion to make him feel unique, authentic, and very much alive.
After a fairly polite standoff between the two leads at a local grocery store, Joe decides to run for mayor himself to represent the everyman. His reasoning for avoiding masks is due to his asthma—and yes, masks can exacerbate asthma symptoms. I speak from personal experience. But no one said a global pandemic would be easy. Still, Joe quickly slides down the reliable pathways of misinformation, conspiratorial thinking, and personal vendetta in his quest to defeat his opponent, who we learn has long been his rival for deeply personal reasons.
Phoenix gives a tour de force performance, a man unraveling at the seams from the first frame of the film to its very last. Thankfully, the film avoids the tired “listen to both sides” tactic. Joe is indefensible, even if he’s at times easy to feel bad for, or worse, maybe even likable.
Pascal delivers a reliably interesting performance, too, but is ultimately given a little less to work with. The film ensures our gaze always returns to Phoenix and his tragic collapse. Emma Stone plays a fascinating supporting character, another victim of circumstance who, in her own way, succumbs to the chaos of our shared end of times. Her narrative unfolds more offscreen than that of the two leading men, but her journey is tragically believable and achingly recognizable. She’s another puzzle piece of hurt so unbearable to confront that she, too, turns to the wiles and evils of digital misinformation.
Like you, I approached Eddington with some concern. It’s no secret that audiences haven’t been ready to face art about the collective hell we all barely survived over the past six years. But Aster’s unique theatre of cruelty has no interest in what we want, or what we think we’re ready for. And thankfully, A24 continues to take the risk of funding and distributing the work of this madman.
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Eddington
Summary
With Ari Aster’s brilliant fourth film ‘Eddington,’ he allows the mask of America’s decency to slip off completely, and what’s revealed beneath is the rotting flesh on the face of the chaotic beast we’ve been becoming for so long.
