In Eddington, Ari Aster doesn’t seek to provide clarity—he wants chaos. This latest film from the creator of Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau Is Afraid is not so much a commentary as it is a provocation, deliberately hollow at its center yet loaded with incendiary ideas. Its surface offers a deeply discomforting reflection of the summer of 2020—the year the world seemed to teeter on the brink of madness—only to ultimately declare that no one can fully understand how we got here. There’s no real roadmap to the hysteria, no grand thesis to decode the collapse of reason, the explosion of conspiracy theories, or the fracturing of society. The film shrugs, unapologetically. Want answers? Too bad. You won’t get them. No one will.
This bold, confrontational stance is precisely the point. Eddington is not interested in easy moralizing or hand-holding; it thrives on ambiguity, contradiction, and discomfort. The film dives headfirst into controversial subjects—race, politics, misinformation, and pandemic paranoia—not to resolve them, but to stir the pot and watch the flames rise. It’s not surprising that its Cannes premiere polarized critics, and it will likely spark just as many arguments when it reaches audiences. Some will laud Aster’s uncompromising ambition and audacity. Others will condemn the film’s approach as reckless or even dangerous. Aster, it seems, welcomes both camps. He’s crafted a movie that reflects a world torn apart—and in doing so, seeks to divide its viewers as well.
At its core, Eddington is a genre-blurring, darkly comic Western that always circles back to the dusty streets of its namesake town: Eddington, New Mexico. With a modest population of 2,634, the town is a microcosm of a world on the verge of collapse. Enter Joe Cross (played by Joaquin Phoenix), a world-weary sheriff whose name sounds straight out of a John Wayne movie. But Joe isn’t your classic white-hat lawman. He’s confused, bitter, and desperate for relevance in a world that no longer makes sense to him. As the chaos of 2020 begins to unfold, he becomes both a mirror and a warning for the rest of us.
Aster paints 2020 as the ultimate cinematic antagonist—a “Man in Black” who rides into town and sets off an unstoppable chain of events. In this metaphorical Western, the saloon is a local bar and grocery store owned by Mayor Ted Garcia, portrayed with steely charm by Pedro Pascal. Garcia is Joe’s political rival and personal nemesis, thanks in no small part to a tangled past involving Joe’s wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her fiercely opinionated mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell). Tensions between the men ignite over something that feels trivial in hindsight but was explosive in its time: masks.
When Joe intervenes in a confrontation at the grocery store over someone refusing to wear a mask—because, after all, no one in Eddington has caught COVID yet—he unwittingly launches his transformation from small-town sheriff to political agitator. He latches onto anti-masking as a crusade, fueling his delusions of purpose and leadership. His campaign for mayor quickly devolves into a satire of small-town politics and pandemic-era posturing. He covers his car with wild conspiracy slogans, clutches at populist talking points, and increasingly loses his grip on reality.
Joe’s evolution isn’t so much a fall from grace as it is a desperate scramble for identity. Like many in 2020, he discovers that chaos can be a stage. The pandemic, protests, and paranoia offer people like Joe a chance to finally feel seen, to declare themselves as someone—even if that someone is a walking compilation of YouTube theories and talk radio catchphrases. Aster plays these scenes with biting humor, and Phoenix leans into the character’s descent with a tragicomic brilliance that underlines just how pathetic—and terrifying—Joe truly is.
But Eddington doesn’t limit its critique to one man. Aster builds a mosaic of madness, filled with characters who each represent different shades of 2020’s cultural breakdown. There’s Dawn, the conspiracy-hungry mother-in-law who spreads misinformation like gospel, printing out wild theories and leaving them around the house like sacred texts. There’s Louise, drawn to a charismatic, viral self-help grifter (played by Austin Butler), who spouts hollow affirmations that somehow resonate in a world gone upside-down. Butler’s character is intentionally vague and underwritten—one of several narrative red herrings that tease deeper meaning only to dissipate into absurdity.
This structure is deliberate. Just as the audience starts to follow one thematic thread—whether it’s pandemic denialism, the racial reckoning following George Floyd’s death, or the media’s role in fueling hysteria—Aster yanks us away, dragging us down another trail of idiocy and unrest. He’s not interested in neatly tying up threads; he wants to capture the dizzying, relentless flood of outrage, misinformation, and tribalism that defined the era.
And yet, despite the chaos, Eddington is a beautifully crafted film. Aster’s long-time collaborator Darius Khondji delivers masterful cinematography, capturing the dusty melancholy of the Southwest with sweeping shots that echo classic Westerns while also heightening the surreal tension of modern paranoia. The film’s editing, handled with finesse by Lucian Johnston, moves the story briskly despite its length, creating a rhythm that feels both propulsive and disorienting—much like the events it seeks to portray.
The performances are uniformly strong, with Phoenix delivering one of his most complex turns yet. His Joe is pathetic, yes, but also weirdly charismatic—a man who spirals downward with such conviction that you can’t help but watch. Emma Stone offers a compelling counterpoint, portraying Louise as someone torn between reason and the seductive comfort of lies. Deirdre O’Connell is chilling as the matriarchal embodiment of conspiracy culture, while Pascal’s Garcia simmers with a mix of charm, rage, and regret.
However, not all characters are served equally. The younger cast members—played by Micheal Ward, Luke Grimes, Cameron Mann, Matt Gomez Hidaka, and William Belleau—become pawns in Aster’s larger metaphor, their fates more reflective of narrative convenience than emotional resonance. This weakens the film’s emotional core, especially as the story veers into increasingly violent territory.
That violence, inevitable as it is in a Western, arrives with force. As protests begin to ripple across the nation in response to George Floyd’s murder, the unrest makes its way to Eddington. Here, Eddington steps into especially volatile territory. Aster juxtaposes the justified rage of the Black Lives Matter movement with the performative, often cartoonish hysteria around masking and lockdowns. It’s a risky move—one that flirts with false equivalence and provokes uncomfortable questions about satire, privilege, and representation.
At this point, Eddington begins to feel like it’s riding a dangerous line between critique and exploitation. While Aster’s detached, ironic tone works for skewering pandemic misinformation, it becomes more problematic when applied to racial injustice. The film’s handling of non-white characters, particularly as the violence escalates, feels increasingly tone-deaf. The same absurdist lens that treats hydroxychloroquine memes with bemused horror is now turned on a much more deeply rooted pain, and the results are uneasy.
But perhaps that unease is the point. Eddington isn’t trying to comfort or clarify. It’s designed to offend, to provoke, to split the audience into camps just as America was split in 2020. In many ways, it succeeds brilliantly. It captures the absurdity of performative politics, the seductive pull of conspiracy culture, and the way fear makes people cling to nonsense as if it were truth. It holds a cracked mirror up to the modern world and dares the viewer to look.
That said, it also stumbles. The satire can feel glib. The metaphors grow too convoluted. The characters, particularly the non-white ones, sometimes feel like vehicles for shock value rather than fully realized people. The result is a film that is undeniably fascinating but not always satisfying. It invites endless debate about its meaning and morality, and perhaps that’s exactly what Aster intended.
By setting his film in a traditional Western framework—complete with dusty streets, political rivalries, and violent showdowns—Aster recontextualizes 2020 as a new kind of frontier. Instead of cattle rustlers and gold rushes, this frontier is defined by social media mobs, viral misinformation, and ideological standoffs in the produce aisle. The Wild West becomes a metaphor for a society that has lost its moral compass and is now driven by rage, insecurity, and a desperate need to belong to something—anything.
As Eddington barrels toward its bloody finale, it doesn’t offer redemption or resolution. There’s no lesson, no catharsis—just a haunting echo of what we’ve lived through, filtered through satire, tragedy, and genre-bending madness. In that sense, it’s a work of art that holds up a middle finger to traditional narrative structure and dares you to follow anyway.
Is it a masterpiece? A disaster? A social experiment? Maybe all three. But if you walk out of Eddington enraged, confused, or disturbed, you’ve experienced exactly what Aster intended.Filed from the Cannes Film Festival on May 17, Eddington opens in theaters July 18—and whether you love it or loathe it, it promises to be one of the most talked-about films of the year.
