Ari Aster has been on a heater lately. Hereditary turned grief into a haunted house you wear on your face, Midsommar made broad daylight feel like a nightmare you can’t blink away, and Beau Is Afraid… well, that one wasn’t my flavor, but you can’t say the man isn’t swinging for the fences. Love him or side-eye him, Aster’s been the guy reliably bringing big, uncomfortable, oddly beautiful choices to the multiplex, turning family drama into folk horror, panic attacks into operas, and good taste into a dare.
So, when Eddington rolled into town, I braced for another Aster special: the kind of weird that sticks to your ribs and makes your group chat suspiciously quiet. I was expecting a filmmaker fully in his bag — mixing menace with deadpan humor, staging set pieces that feel both inevitable and unthinkable, and poking at modern anxieties until they bleed symbolism. In other words, I went in ready for “Aster being Aster,” just hopefully filtered through a fresh lens: odd, audacious and (fingers crossed) amazing.
Eddington drops us right into the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic, setting its story in the dusty confines of a small New Mexico town that shares its name with the film. Here, Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) issues a mask mandate for public spaces, only to find his authority openly defied by the local sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix). Old grudges between the two men quickly bubble to the surface, with Joe deciding to challenge Ted in the upcoming mayoral race. As tensions mount, waves of BLM protesters pour into Eddington, colliding with locals, agitators and extremists alike –turning the town into a tinderbox where politics, personal vendettas and national unrest all ignite at once.
If Ari Aster set out to prove once again that no one bends reality into a fever dream quite like he does, Eddington is the proof on screen. This isn’t a straightforward story — it’s a surrealist collage stitched together from news headlines, internet paranoia and the collective unease of 2020. From the very first scene, the film feels off-kilter, balancing comedy and tragedy in bizarre ways and turning the politics of a small New Mexico town into a carnival of hysteria. It’s strange, abrasive and impossible to look away from, which is exactly what you’d expect from Aster at this point in his career.
The surreal touches, though, aren’t just for show. Aster uses them to amplify the absurdity of a year when reality itself felt slippery. Masks, mandates, protests and conspiracy theories — all of it is filtered through a lens that exaggerates the madness until it teeters on the edge of parody. What we’re watching isn’t a literal depiction of 2020, but rather the warped reflection of it, a grotesque funhouse mirror that forces us to recognize how truth, fear and ideology distorted our everyday lives. By the time the movie finds its rhythm, it becomes clear that Aster hasn’t simply made another surreal film — he’s weaponized surrealism, making it sting as much as it dazzles.
That imbalance carries into the characters, too. Pedro Pascal’s Mayor Ted should be an anchor in the story — the voice of reason in a town unraveling — but instead, he’s overshadowed at every turn by Joaquin Phoenix’s Sheriff Joe, a live wire of volatility and unpredictability. Emma Stone’s Louise (Joe’s wife) hints at a deep trauma that could have reshaped the narrative, only to vanish before her arc can bear fruit. And then there’s the militia, a bizarre, well-armed group that storms the town with no clear purpose and exits just as suddenly.
Time and again, Eddington raises fascinating threads, only to leave them dangling and at first, it feels like sloppy storytelling.
But maybe that’s the trick. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Eddington isn’t messy by accident — it’s messy by design. Aster doesn’t try to sanitize or streamline the chaos of 2020; he leans into it. At 149 minutes, the film plays like an emotional time capsule of that year: relentless, overwhelming and often deliberately unpleasant. Each subplot, no matter how underdeveloped, mirrors the way events piled on top of each other in real life, leaving no room for clarity or closure. The disjointedness isn’t a flaw so much as a feature, reflecting the instability of a world that refused to make sense.
And that’s when the epiphany hit me. Eddington isn’t trying to comfort or resolve — it’s trying to make us feel. It’s a metaphorical pipe bomb, detonating all the fear, anger, paranoia and exhaustion of that time in a single cinematic experience.
Rather than catharsis, Aster offers unease; rather than clarity, confusion. Watching Eddington is like being shoved back into the whirlwind of 2020, only now with the absurdity turned up to 11. And as frustrating as that may be, it’s also brilliant in its own way — because maybe the only honest way to revisit that year is to make the audience feel just as fractured, overwhelmed and unsettled as they did living through it.
With that realization, I have to give Eddington four out of five stars. Ari Aster once again proves that no one crafts surreal fever dreams quite like him, twisting the events of 2020 into a distorted funhouse mirror of paranoia, politics and pandemic anxiety. While the film often feels uneven, that imbalance seems intentional. Rather than telling a clean story, Aster leans into the mess, turning the chaos of that year into a relentless 149-minute barrage of fear, anger and absurdity. It’s not comfortable, and it’s not meant to be.
Eddington is a deliberately disorienting time capsule, a cinematic pipe bomb that reminds us of how fractured, overwhelming and surreal that period truly felt.