You might need to lie down for a bit after “Eddington.” Preferably in a dark room with no screens and no talking. “Eddington,” Ari Aster’s latest nightmare vision, is sure to divide (along which lines, I’m can’t fathom) but there is one thing I think everyone will be able to agree on: It is an experience that will leave you asking “WHAT?” The movie opens on the aggravated ramblings of an unhoused man and doesn’t get much more coherent from there. Approach with caution.
We talk a lot about movies as an escape from the stresses of the world. “Eddington,” in which a small, fictional town in New Mexico becomes a microcosm of life in the misinformation age, and more specifically during the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, is very much the opposite of that. It is an anti-escapist symphony of masking debates, conspiracy theories, YouTube prophets, TikTok trends and third-rail topics in which no side is spared. Most everyone looks insane and ridiculous by the end, from the white teenage girl (Amélie Hoeferle) telling a Black cop (Michael Ward) to join the movement, to the grammatical errors of the truthers, as the town spirals into chaos and gruesome violence.
Joaquin Phoenix plays the town sheriff, a soft-spoken wife guy named Joe Cross, who we meet out in the desert one night watching YouTube videos about how to convince your wife to have a baby. He’s interrupted by cops from the neighboring town, who demand he put on a mask since he’s technically crossed the border.
It is May 2020, and everyone is a little on edge. Joe, frustrated by the hysterical commitment to mandates from nowhere, finds himself the unofficial spokesperson for the right to go unmasked. He pits himself against the slick local mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is up for reelection, in the pocket of big tech and ready to exploit his single fatherhood for political gain. At home, Joe’s mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) spends all day consuming internet conspiracy theories, while his wife Louise (a criminally underused Emma Stone) works on crafts and nurses unspoken traumas.
Joe’s eagerness to take on Ted isn’t just about masking. Years ago, Ted dated his now-wife, a story that will be twisted into rape and grooming accusations. Caricatures and stereotypes are everywhere in “Eddington,” but in this world it feels like the women are especially underwritten — they are kooks, victims, zealots and the ones who push fragile men to the brink. But in “Eddington,” all the conspiracies are real and ordinary people are all susceptible to the madness. In fact, insanity is just an inevitability no matter how well-intentioned one starts out, whether that’s the woke-curious teen rattled by rejection, or the loyal deputy Guy (Luke Grimes) who is suddenly more than happy to accuse a colleague of murder. Louise will also be swayed by a floppy-haired internet guru, a cult-like leader played with perfect swagger by Austin Butler.
The problem with an anarchic satire like “Eddington,” in theaters Friday, is that any criticism could easily be dismissed with a “that’s the point” counterargument. And yet there is very little to be learned in this silo of provocations that, like all Aster movies, escalates until the movie is over. There are moments of humor and wit, too, as well as expertly built tension and release. “Eddington” is not incompetently done or unwatchable (the cast and the director kind of guarantee that); it just doesn’t feel a whole of anything other than a cinematic expression of broken brains.
Five years after we just went through (at least a lot of) this, “Eddington” somehow seems both too late and too soon, especially when it offers so little wisdom or insight beyond a vision of hopelessness. I wonder what world Aster thought he’d be releasing this film into. Maybe one that was better, not cosmically worse.
It’s possible “Eddington” will age well. Perhaps it’s the kind of movie that future Gen Alpha cinephiles will point to as being ahead of its time, a work that was woefully misunderstood by head-in-the-sand critics who didn’t see that it was 2025’s answer to the prescient paranoia cinema of the 1970s.
Not to sound like the studio boss in “Sullivan’s Travels,” trying to get the filmmaker with big issues on the mind to make a dumb comedy, but right now, “Eddington” feels like the last thing any of us need.
“Eddington,” an A24 release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “for strong violence, some grisly images, language and graphic nudity.” Running time: 148 minutes. Two stars out of four.
