Ari Aster’s new dark-comedy, set during the Covid pandemic, paints an excoriating picture of the alt-right and liberals alike
Ari Aster’s reputation as a master of modern panic-attack horror, from Hereditary to Midsommar, has only grown over the course of his career. I’ve often had a mixed response to his films while never failing to be impressed by their audacity, unpredictability, visual artistry and out-and-out meanness. With his fourth feature, Eddington – a horror only in the sense that its growing dread, loneliness, and violence reflect the most awful truths of 2020 America – Aster combines all these tendencies. It is unsparingly, ironically funny, brutally skewering both the fact-denying psychosis of right-wing conspiracy theorists and the self-righteous tone-deafness of white liberals.
In a fictional small-town New Mexico enclave, set in the early, paranoid days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is struggling. His wife, Louise (Emma Stone), is bedridden and struggling with her mental health, made worse by her isolation, her conspiracy theorist mother, and her long hours online, obsessing over a QAnon-style “thought leader” (a hilarious, unsettling Austin Butler).
Joe is increasingly agitated and suspicious at the insistence of wearing masks, even going so far as to challenge the local mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal, wonderfully smug) on the necessity of their county mandate. Infuriated, Sheriff Joe decides to run against Garcia for mayor on a vague Covid-denying conspiracy platform, driven by underlying personal animus and the rising tide of Black Lives Matter protests after the police murder of George Floyd that summer.
It’s soon clear that Phoenix’s sheriff, carrying himself with a faux-confident stupidity, is a frustrated and emasculated man, spouting proclamations and accusations at his rival that have no real basis (“Your being manipulated!” goes the misspelled sign on his campaign van). When the spectre of racial strife appears in town – a small Black Lives Matter protest that sends the police of Eddington into a panic – things threaten to veer over the edge and into violence.
With its well-observed, often darkly hilarious details of oddball inhabitants and chilling deployment of the chaotic overwhelm of social media in our lives, Eddington walks a thin line between dread and comedy.
And it remains one of the only films made thus far to capture the madness, anger, and confusion of 2020 – to show how the pandemic brought so many underlying issues, both personal and social, to the boil.
It’s a little all over the place, revealing Aster’s usual flaws: trying to stuff far too many ideas into a plot to make it fully satisfying, or prioritising his seeming enjoyment of shocking the audience.
But it is also a film that captures the incoherent political muddle that has led to Donald Trump’s second term, and far from sitting on the fence, it presents a punishing conclusion for those seduced by what Maga and the alt right has to offer.
