Cast: Emma Stone, Clifton Collins Jr., Joaquin Phoenix, William Belleau, Pedro Pascal, Austin Butler, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O’Connell, Micheal Ward, Amélie Hoeferle
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Western
Director: Ari Aster
In Irish Cinemas: 22nd August 2025
2020 now occupies a strange place in our collective psyche — a year that feels both impossibly remote and yet still uncomfortably within reach, as though time itself refuses to carry us fully past it. The pandemic lingers in memory less like a closed chapter than like an aftershock: a wound that never quite healed, a presence that shadows culture, politics, and personal memory alike. Filmmakers have tried, cautiously, to capture that moment — its stillness, its disorientation, its absurdity — but few have engaged with it as ferociously, or as darkly playfully, as Ari Aster does in Eddington.
With his fourth feature, Aster veers away yet again from the terrain he’s charted before. The claustrophobic terror of Hereditary and the ritualistic dread of Midsommar are nowhere to be found; even the sprawling nightmare-logic of Beau Is Afraid gives way to something sharper, leaner, and more corrosively funny. Eddington is not a horror film in the traditional sense, though it brims with dread. It is instead a bleakly comic satire, rooted in the warped atmosphere of early Covid — that anxious stretch of days when the world seemed at once unified in crisis and yet irrevocably splintered, when social fault lines cracked wide under the pressures of lockdowns, protests, paranoia, and the endless drone of information.
At the story’s centre is Joaquin Phoenix as Sheriff Joe Cross, the hapless lawman of the small New Mexico town from which the film takes its name. Joe is a man adrift: belittled by his conspiracy-minded wife Louise (Emma Stone), dominated by his acid-tongued mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell), and mocked by the very deputies (Luke Grimes, Micheal Ward) meant to serve under him. His stubborn refusal to wear a mask — just as local cases begin to climb — makes him both ridiculous and strangely sympathetic. Aster refuses to flatten Joe into an easy caricature. He’s not a stock villain or buffoon but something sadder: a man clinging to a warped idea of dignity, stumbling over his convictions as the ground shifts beneath him.
When Joe decides, almost by accident, to run for mayor, the film’s satire sharpens. His opponent is the smooth-talking incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), a polished progressive whose charisma conceals his compromises. Their rivalry is more than a political contest — it’s a collision of worldviews, a small-town echo of national culture wars. Aster grounds this conflict in the particulars of New Mexico, exploring the delicate, often fraught interplay between sheriffs, city officials, and Indigenous Pueblos, and showing how those already-tense dynamics buckle under the twin pressures of pandemic restrictions and the racial justice uprisings of 2020. Into this fraying civic fabric slinks Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), a magnetic cult leader who thrives on chaos, conspiracy, and the addictive churn of online spectacle.
Hovering over all of it is the internet itself, rendered in a hauntingly absurd image: a massive data centre looming over the desert town like some modern-day cathedral to misinformation and rage. Aster himself has called the film “a Western, but the guns are phones.” The metaphor is almost too perfect: Eddington stages its shootouts not with bullets but with livestreams, memes, and viral clips — skirmishes fought and lost before the dust has even settled, each battle mediated, packaged, and uploaded in real time.
The descent into farce feels both inevitable and merciless. Aster orchestrates the unravelling with unnerving precision, balancing hysteria and humour, grotesquerie and pathos, as his characters spin further out of control. Not every gamble succeeds — the ending, with its willful refusal of closure, will no doubt exasperate audiences seeking resolution — but the ambition of the work is undeniable. In a cinematic landscape still hesitant to look the pandemic squarely in the face, Aster doesn’t just look; he stares, laughs, and dares us to do the same.
Ultimately, Eddington lands less as a straightforward narrative than as a collective exorcism. It is satire, yes, but also tragedy, farce, and scream therapy all tangled together — a portrait of a society tearing itself apart even as it tries to stitch itself back together. Outrageous, unsettling, and strangely cathartic, the film feels like a howl echoing from 2020 into the present: raw, absurd, and impossible to ignore
Overall: 7/10
Movie Reviewer
