Eddington: As We Are

Ari Aster has cracked the code. Whatever your politics or your feelings about our “moment,” Eddington (2025) represents a formal achievement. He’s projected our phones and COVID onto the silver screen in a manner that is neither cloying nor haphazard. For how long have directors pussyfooted their way around this age of cyber schizophrenia? Phones might upend the plot of many pre-2010s horror films, but the real issue is knottier. Text messages, YouTube videos, doomscrolling—these are not interesting to watch. COVID, another matter altogether, seems too close and too charged to depict. And yet, here is Aster.

The approach works on account of its realism. For the director of Midsommar (2019) and Beau Is Afraid (2023) this might seem a contradiction in terms. His worlds are full of absurd background jokes, like Beau’s O’loha: Best of Hawaii & Ireland frozen dinner in the latter, or the sun-soaked pagan magic of Aster’s most recent horror venture. Much like early seasons of The Simpsons (1989-Somehow Still the Present), the absurdity exists to train eyes on the ways in which the director has the real world squarely in his sights. The sheriff’s wife’s bizarre doll creations, his deputy’s single-minded focus on Bitcoin—these are dumb, cheap jokes because we inhabit a dumb, cheap world.

Eddington is about a man going insane for entirely sane reasons. Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), a New Mexican sheriff, has asthma. He doesn’t like wearing masks. Yet, it is early 2020 and he must enforce the state’s new mask mandate, supported by mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), in as-yet COVID-free Eddington. Quite the pickle. What does he do? Protest? Join a movement? No, he goes on his phone to make a car-seat video declaring his candidacy for mayor. Nashville-style (1975), Sheriff Joe decks out his car in anti-Ted bumper stickers. He rolls around town, mic in hand and near mouth, shouting about government oppression.

Where things go from there is not mine to tell. That would be to deprive you, dear reader, of a journey into the American mind that must be experienced to be understood. AI data centers, hippy, repressed-memory internet grifters, liberal mayors who blast Katy Perry—this film has it all. All our neuroses, everything that represents our splintered realities, is on display.

Now, I said Joe had “sane reasons” above. I do not mean that it’s sane to refuse to wear a mask. Aster casts his characters in a sympathetic light—everyone is made fun of, everyone is grounded in their own, more-or-less internally coherent perspective. Joe, for instance, loses it when a store employee refuses entrance to an old man with no mask, looking to buy a ventilator for his wife. Of course, many of those clapping—or those like them anyway—who applaud when the man eventually gets in and is thrown out wear their masks tucked beneath their noses.

Joe’s wife, Louise (Emma Stone) and mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), are off the deep end. It’s conspiracies, repressed memories, and the no-spin zone all the way down. Aster juxtaposes these two right-wing realities. Stone, who does seem to have been abused by someone close to her, can get no real help, and so she goes off the deep end. Joe, whose problems are minute by comparison, laments his wife’s slipping away, putting more and more of himself into his campaign. Louise, a major cause of her daughter’s distress, drives them both insane with her spitball approach to life, her Gematria and chemtrails. How, Aster seems to ask, can these people not be what they are?

That, my friends, is the film’s uncompromising realism. Every absurd background joke like a character falling into a display case for Geronimo’s bones confirms only the absurdity of our own existences. Americans are insane because America is insane. There’s no two ways about it. Phones and laptops, which every characters turns to, sadly and expectedly, whenever they have a moment of silence, trap these people even further. Louise knows she has problems. An internet grifter offers a solution. Joe dislikes Ted and his hypocrisy, his clear backroom dealing with the rich and powerful at the expense of the town, but the only form of protest he grasps at is a Facebook post.

No one, then, comes in for singular blame, though Aster, in a late sequence, comes close to pinning the fundamental issues on our security state and its relationship to big business. If you can laugh at yourself, you’ll laugh at the film. Why? Because you’re in it somewhere; we all are. We’re all on our phones. We’ve all either been mad about wearing a mask or thought to ourselves “thank God that person was made to comply.” We’ve all seen a relative nosedive into digital brain degeneration. We’ve all dunked our heads into the tainted trough.

This is America. This is us.