Ari Aster’s Eddington is a film that defies easy classification. It is a sprawling, strange, and hypnotic reflection of a nation unraveling under pressure, a psychological and political fever dream set against the fractured landscape of 2020 America. Part social satire, part descent into madness, it captures a moment in history with such raw intensity that it feels both uncomfortably familiar and impossible to look away from.
The story takes place in a small desert town in New Mexico, a place that seems forgotten by the world until it becomes a battleground for the country’s cultural and ideological wars. The film opens with a haunting image of a lone figure staggering across the desert at dawn, a visual motif that recurs throughout the story, people lost in vast, empty spaces, searching for meaning in an age of noise. From the beginning, Aster establishes that this is not just a portrait of a town but a mirror held up to an entire nation.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross, the town’s weary sheriff, who soon decides to run for mayor after a dispute over a mask mandate during the height of the pandemic. His opponent, the sitting mayor, played with quiet conviction by Pedro Pascal, becomes both political rival and moral foil. Their conflict unfolds not just in debates and town meetings but through the tense atmosphere that grips the community, where every gesture becomes a declaration of allegiance. What begins as a small-town election soon transforms into a symbolic clash between paranoia and reason, control and chaos, faith and evidence.
Aster doesn’t follow a straightforward plot. Instead, he constructs a dense, shifting mosaic of characters and tones. One moment the film feels like an absurdist comedy of manners, the next it plunges into psychological horror or surreal tragedy. The tonal instability is deliberate, reflecting a world where certainty itself has evaporated. The film’s rhythm is jagged and unpredictable, but this unevenness becomes part of its power. Aster isn’t trying to comfort or entertain; he’s capturing the confusion of an age when everything, from politics to intimacy, feels unstable.
Emma Stone gives one of the film’s most quietly devastating performances as Louise, Joe’s wife. Her role is smaller than Phoenix’s, but she carries much of the film’s emotional weight. Louise’s loneliness and fear are rendered with heartbreaking subtlety, particularly in her scenes with her aging mother. Through her, the film touches on how isolation and anxiety can twist into something darker, especially when the world outside offers no sense of order or empathy. Stone’s performance anchors the film in a deeply human sorrow that contrasts with Joe’s manic, increasingly desperate crusade.
The supporting cast adds rich texture to this portrait of collapse. Pascal’s mayor is charismatic but pragmatic, a man who believes in civic duty even as he’s swallowed by the anger of his constituents. Austin Butler, appearing as a mysterious drifter and self-styled prophet, injects the story with volatility and menace. His presence signals the growing influence of conspiracy and cult-like thinking, as townspeople begin to gather around him in pursuit of simple answers to impossible questions. These scenes of communal hysteria, candlelit vigils, rambling speeches broadcast on social media, feel disturbingly authentic.
Visually, Eddington is stunning. Darius Khondji’s cinematography paints the desert landscape with an apocalyptic grandeur. The camera often lingers in wide, still frames that dwarf the characters against the endless horizon, suggesting both their insignificance and their entrapment. The interiors, by contrast, are suffocatingly tight, filled with flickering light and screens that echo the constant hum of digital chatter. The imagery is rich with symbolism: shadows cast by televisions, faces illuminated by phone screens, the eerie quiet of a town that has forgotten how to listen. Aster’s visual style remains meticulous and painterly, but here he channels it toward something looser and angrier, less about aesthetic perfection and more about capturing emotional disarray.
What truly distinguishes Eddington is its ambition. It’s not just a film about the pandemic or politics, but about how reality itself fractures when people stop believing in shared truth. The film captures the disorientation of the early 2020s, the sense that every institution was crumbling, every conversation turning into conflict, every piece of information subject to suspicion. Aster’s script circles around questions of identity and belonging, asking whether a community can survive when its members no longer agree on what is real. It’s a theme that feels both timely and timeless, resonating beyond the specifics of its setting.
Not everything in Eddington works perfectly. The pacing is erratic, and some scenes feel indulgent or self-consciously provocative. Aster occasionally lets his ideas sprawl beyond coherence, piling metaphors on top of one another until the meaning becomes opaque. Yet even its excesses feel purposeful, a reflection of the chaos it seeks to depict. The film’s climactic act, where the town descends into near-mythic violence and hysteria, will divide viewers. Some will see it as too symbolic, too exaggerated; others will recognize it as the logical endpoint of the forces the film has traced all along.
Phoenix’s performance encapsulates the film’s contradictions. His Joe Cross is alternately pathetic and terrifying, a man who mistakes self-righteous anger for purpose. Phoenix doesn’t ask for sympathy; he offers exposure. By the film’s end, Joe is less a character than an emblem of a culture consumed by its own reflection. His unraveling feels both tragic and inevitable.
Despite its flaws, Eddington is a remarkable achievement. It captures the feeling of a country at war with itself with a specificity that few films have dared to attempt. It is ambitious, messy, infuriating, and profound, a film that dares to wrestle with the spiritual sickness of the modern age without resorting to cynicism or comfort. It doesn’t offer answers or resolution; instead, it leaves us in the uneasy silence after the storm, asking what kind of world we are willing to build from the ruins.
In the months since its release, audiences and critics have been sharply divided. Some see Eddington as a misfire, a film too strange and self-absorbed to connect. Others recognize it as a work of rare courage, one that confronts the noise of contemporary life and insists on the possibility of meaning within it. Its reception has been polarized, but that very polarization feels appropriate for a film about disunity itself.
The Blu-ray and 4K UHD releases of Eddington offer only a few special features, but they’re presented with care. The “Made in Eddington” 33-minute making-of documentary and six beautifully designed collectible postcards reflect the same meticulous artistry found in the film’s striking packaging.
Ultimately, Eddington feels like a film that belongs less to the moment of its release and more to the years ahead. Its structure may baffle, and its tone may alienate, but beneath its chaos lies a vision that is both prophetic and painfully sincere. Like many great works that initially confound audiences, it will almost certainly be re-evaluated with time, not as a failure, but as a film that saw too clearly, too soon, what the rest of us were not yet ready to face.
Eddington is available to own on Blu-ray and 4K UHD today!
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