‘Eddington’ is a satirical return to 2020 and a frightening vision of now – 828reviewsNOW

ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — “EDDINGTON” (2025, 149 min., directed by Ari Aster)

In “Eddington,” the new nightmarish Covid satire from “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” director Ari Aster, the politics of 2020 are repositioned as a Wild West duel. On one side of the New Mexico town, you have the liberal, scrupulous mayor, Ted Garcia, played by Pedro Pascal. On the other, you have the conservative, paranoid sheriff, Joe Cross, played by Joaquin Phoenix. As tensions rise in Eddington in May 2020, Garcia and Cross are pitted against each other in an increasingly antic mayoral race.

In true Aster form, “Eddington” is hilarious as it is uncomfortable. While his observations of what life was like in 2020 are razor-sharp, they cut to the bone, too. No one is safe from Aster’s script: young liberal activists are mocked right alongside the conspiracy theorists and anti-maskers of the halcyon pandemic days. Aster has a virtuosic handle on the neuroses of America and each citizen of Eddington feels like their living embodiment.

“Eddington” sports a sprawling cast, including Emma Stone as Cross’ wife, Deirdre O’Connell as her conspiracy-obsessed mother, Austin Butler as a charismatic cult leader, Micheal Ward and Luke Grimes as Eddington police officers and Cameron Mann, Matt Gomez Hidaka and Amélie Hoeferle as young social justice protestors. Though Stone, Butler and Pascal are three of the biggest movie stars in the world, they play small – but pivotal – roles here. This is Phoenix’s movie.

Cross, with all of his emotional shortcomings, complex immorality and Freudian confusion, is a true Aster protagonist. Phoenix turns in a raw, aching performance as the complicated sheriff, who suffers public humiliation, cuckolding and physical torment at his lowest and executes several awful, heinous actions at his highest, simultaneously performing the Western tropes of virtuosic lawman and outlaw scoundrel. Both aspects of Cross are excruciating to witness, but Phoenix makes it impossible to look away.

“Eddington” is a long movie, clocking in at nearly two-and-a-half hours, and made no easier by its exhaustive depiction of a horrible time in American history. While the satirical elements of the film are astute and all-encompassing, by the end, every character is strung-out and in shambles, whatever ideology they were fighting over left bruised and bludgeoned and the story bordering on surrealism. And yet, the final shot of the film isn’t satirical at all. Despite the nuance Aster baked into his exploration of life in 2020, the final image of “Eddington” shouts its thesis statement loud and clear: a massive data center, blue, immense and threatening, looms over the desert just outside of town. The real villain of the piece was not Cross, Garcia or the enemies either of them encounter or imagine. Instead, it was this technological giant, omnipresent during the film but buoyed in the background of every scene by the preoccupations and prejudices of every character. Though “Eddington” is not one of Aster’s horror films, its final shot may be the most sinister image the auteur has conjured yet.

Rating: 4/5