By Kate Bove
Before Ari Aster gained legions of devotees with his back-to-back A24 horror hits, Hereditary and Midsommar, he penned a neo-Western script. The filmmaker had hoped to make his directorial debut with that story, but shelved it. Set in the titular small town of Eddington, New Mexico, Aster’s fourth outing is a different version of that pre-COVID-19 script. And, unfortunately, those grafted-on pandemic touch points are Eddington’s weakest elements.
After a mixed reception at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, Aster’s satirical black comedy is receiving a somewhat-muted release on Friday, July 18. Slotted between superhero-movie weekends, Eddington has pitched itself as an incisive look at a powder keg of a community. It also frames these mounting tensions with a feud between long-time sheriff Joe Cross (Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix) and the town’s incumbent mayor Ted Garcia (three-time 2025 summer movie star Pedro Pascal).
Cross refuses to abide by state-wide mask mandates and wants to maintain the status quo, while the affable Garcia does his shopping in an N95 and hopes to bring big tech jobs to the area. There’s also some history between Joe’s wife, Louise Cross (Oscar winner Emma Stone) and Ted, which Joe and his conspiracy theory-obsessed mother-in-law, Dawn (The Penguin’s Deirdre O’Connell), can’t seem to move on from. While Louise tries to dodge her mom’s barrage of COVID conspiracy videos and articles, she also works through a haunting past trauma by fashioning creepy sculptures that even Toy Story’s Sid would be envious of.
Eventually, Joe decides to enter the mayoral race. He enlists his deputies to create campaign slogans and film videos of him decrying the tyranny of the mask-loving, COVID-fearing government. At first, the film’s political satire works — in large part due to Phoenix and Pascal’s committed performances — but it sours faster than a raw milk joke.
Eddington sees Phoenix reteaming with Aster on the heels of Beau Is Afraid. Phoenix imbues Joe with some surprising nuance; he’s a frustrating, selfish brute in public, but, at home, it’s clear that he cares a lot about Louise and the then-unknown trauma she’s working through. Despite Aster’s typically bold direction and Phoenix’s undeniable prowess, Eddington can’t sustain the highs it hits early on.
Over the course of a runtime that feels even longer it is, the townspeople’s agitation turns explosive. Joe is confounded by the growing Black Lives Matter protests, while Louise joins a cult — helmed by the radical Vernon Jefferson Peak (a scene-stealing Austin Butler) — and confronts her past. What could have been an interesting, satirical character study becomes a caricature about the sorts of hypocrisies that the myriad events of 2020 underscored.
Eddington consistently relies on first-thought jokes — ones that we’ve seen and read and been inundated with many times before. Remember the appearance of murder hornets and performative black squares on Instagram? Of course you do: It all only happened five years ago. Eddington presents these pop cultural and political touch points but does little with them. This leads to dropped threads. Even more unsatisfying, though, is the sense that Eddington is trying to be about too many things and winds up saying very little about any of them.
Aster deftly captures the overwhelming clutter of social media. Contradictory messages crop up in characters’ feeds in a disturbingly true-to-life way. These absurdities also appear in the characters’ lives — in Eddington. It’s all reminiscent of the way we made jokes about 2020 feeling like a poorly written season of TV — one that’s jumped the shark and mashed together too many plotlines.
Ultimately, this discombobulating frenzy, and Aster’s dark-comedy efforts, are consistently undermined by tonal contradictions and missteps. On one hand, that is how 2020 felt too. But, presented in film form, this everything-ness just feels like hollow gesturing.
RATING: 2.5 out of 5
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