Eddington

dir: Ari Aster

2025

I did not like this film at all, at fucking all.

It’s bad enough to be made to remember the horrible pandemic days, and the stupidity that abounded. But to do something so, so lazy with it seems almost negligent, almost actionable.

I know how insane those days were. Those of us who lived through it, as opposed to the millions who died from it that we seem to have completely forgotten about, remember a time of fear, of confusion, of longing both for connection and for isolation, and from that ferment sprung lots of crazy ideas and crazier behaviours.

This flick ultimately says the same thing zombie flicks say, disaster flicks say, war movies say – it doesn’t matter what the external threat is, the real threat is the stupidity and viciousness of regular people. People have their petty insecurities, their compulsions, their fetishes, and from this springs awful actions when opportunities arise.

I am pretty sure Ari Aster, infamous for Hereditary and Midsommar, less so for Beau is Afraid (of his Mother), thought he was making some provocative when he made this. He thought he was really going to deliver us some hot zeitgeist-y satire calculated to offend both the easily offended and types more settled in their beliefs and prejudices. This flick is about as provocative as vaping, as shocking as mocking vegetarians, as fierce as saying the kids of today have too many tattoos and piercings.

It has many faults, many failings, many poorly thought out ideas, all lumped in together with the intention of seeming more important than it could possibly be if there’s just enough references made. Using the small New Mexico town of Eddington as a particularly stupid microcosm or lens through which to “observe” American venality is not a particularly inspired idea, but how lazily it is all treated should make you hang your head in disgust.

Speaking of which, I want to say I am getting pretty sick of Joaquin Phoenix’s cinematic humiliation kink that the rest of us are being forced to endure. The last four films I’ve seen him in have him playing pathetic characters who are degraded and humiliated onscreen seemingly for our pleasure but mostly, I am starting to suspect, for his.

I don’t get nothing out of it, Joaquin.

Here he plays the sheriff of a particularly unimpressive town called Eddington. The covid pandemic has started killing people elsewhere, but it hasn’t arrived at this town as yet. But some people are wearing masks, and others, like Joe, don’t want to wear them, but they especially don’t want to be told that they have to wear them. The enforcement or the half-arsed adherence to various protocols are meant to make us smile and/or nod our heads in remembrance. The more I watched this flick, the more I was convinced that I don’t want to remember it at all.

Joe has many grievances; most are petty, some are more substantial. He especially, irrationally hates the mayor of Eddington, being Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), probably because he’s just too damn handsome. Joe is married to a mentally unwell woman (Emma Stone) who he is convinced Ted long ago had some kind of relationship with, even though no-one agrees with him. He’s obsessed with the idea of somehow having been cuckolded in the past. His wife and her mother are delusionally, dementedly obsessed with conspiracy theories, down to and including the QAnon type child slavery rings in pizza shop basements bullshit that is manna from heaven for morons the length and breadth of the country.

But Joe has too much on his plate to worry about that nonsense – there’s other nonsense to worry about. As an asthmatic he finds it (psychologically) hard to breath with a mask on, and finds it offensive when others comply with it, or when others are shamed for not wearing them. This combined with his obsession with Ted having one up on him convinces him he has to run for mayor himself because…reasons.

And there’s some angry homeless guy probably riddled with covid wandering around yelling at people, with whom Joe has an embarrassing scuffle. And George Floyd just went to his eternal reward at the hands and knees of corrupt, brutal, stupid cops, which means Black Lives Matter protests are springing up across the nation, including in, you guessed it, Eddington, where the ones taking the burden of protesting upon themselves are, you guessed it, the white teenagers of the town, who mostly get involved because they want to impress someone they want to have sex with.

What I’m describing sounds like plot, like plot machinations, but they’re not, really. They’re just lame elements dropped into a bitter stew that never comes together and never coheres. Unconvincing bullshit keeps happening until the film goes completely fucking insane and Joe starts murdering people.

Usually I would bother with some kind of spoiler warning, because the film that precedes that moment is fundamentally different from the flick that follows afterwards. As in, the flick we were watching was very much a drama about a tense time and awkward interactions between various people. Then, like now most of Aster’s movies, shit starts happening that’s so crazy that you start wondering whether it’s actually happening even within the fiction of the film, or whether someone is hallucinating everything that’s happening.

I keep waiting for someone to wake up, gasping, or for Bobby Ewing to come out of the shower like in the Dallas finale or for someone to wake up in bed with Suzanne Pleshette like in the Newhart finale to reveal It Was All Just a (Bad) Dream. I spent all of Aster’s last film waiting for the other shoe to drop which never did, and everything after Joe murders people for no good reason in this film thinking “none of this could be real, could it?” only for the flick to double down and say uh huh, it’s all really happening to these poor, thinly drawn characters; there ain’t no escape from the stupid.

I have an image in my head of Ari Aster giving interviews with people and saying things along the lines of “well, I wanted to be an equal opportunity offender, skewering the prejudices of both left and right” and to that I would say you’re not even on a level that threatens the worst episode of South Park, not even close. I think he really thinks he’s doing something on a par with maybe Todd Solondz from the 90s and early 2000s, whose films like Welcome to the Doll House, Happiness and Storytelling still make me squirm and dry retch in discomfort to this day, which were calculated provocations that genuinely polarised audiences, and probably left a few people deeply traumatised.

This flick? Eh. I’d be amazed if anyone else who’s watched this even has a mild opinion on it, beyond “so lame”.

It’s not triggering, it’s not provoking to just have characters relate conspiracy theories to other characters like they’re accepted facts and just have inert scene after inert scene where people say crazy stuff and it’s as if we’re just meant to go “ha ha these people are so dumb” because we haven’t been given a reason to have any sympathy for them or to see them as anything other than a stand in for an idea. Austin Butler, giving probably the least convincing performance of his career, and this guy played Elvis once, I’m not kidding, talks like the least confident cult leader I’ve ever seen. The only thing less believable than him as the leader of a cult of people convinced they carry supressed memories of sexual abuse as children by some other cabal of child abusers, is the performance Emma Stone gives as a mentally damaged person that needs to believe in him and also have a child with him.

There’s even the strangest form of foreshadowing I’ve ever seen in a film where, in case the director worried we weren’t going to get it and think it was ironic, well before she’s shown as pregnant, she’s shown getting out of a cab that has a big sign on its roof helpfully asking the question “Pregnant?”

Well, yes, eventually. Does this film have a point, other than that a humiliated man pushed too far by things not going his way might go on a rampage and try to shoot his way to glory? Well, that’s now the American dream, which happens daily, so that’s nothing special. What about the point that a jealous teenager trying to manipulate one guy into shooting another guy because he feels left out of a love triangle is naturally going to be America’s next Kyle Rittenhouse, is that ironic or amusing?

Is it fuck. What about a main character ending up a vegetable abused by his carer, having to share a bed with his mother-in-law and the carer? Is that comeuppance, is that just deserts, is that chickens coming home to roost?

It’s none of the above. I feel contempt towards this flick and everything it tries to do and everything it fails to do. It raises a bunch of questions about what people did and how people acted, then says absolutely nothing worthwhile about any of it. To call the film hollow would be an insult to objects that are hollow yet still serve a purpose, like any empty water bottle you can think of.

It’s not good, I’ll give it that much. It’s not good at all.

4 times my layers of privilege mean I shouldn’t even be speaking right now out of 10

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“Are you fucking retarded? What the fuck are you talking about?” – Brian’s dad yelling at him gave me the only laugh I enjoyed in an entire 149 minute movie - Eddington