When it comes to writer/director Ari Aster, the only thing that it seems movie fans can expect is to expect the unexpected. From Hereditary through Midsommar right up to Beau is Afraid, it’s hard to tell what the auteur is going to do. And that trend continues with his newest movie, Eddington.
Set in May of the year 2020 in the town of Eddington, New Mexico, Eddington finds the small community in the midst of a political struggle between the progressive mayor Ted Garcia (The Mandalorian’s Pedro Pascal) and the town’s conservative sheriff, Joe Cross (Beau himself from Beau is Afraid, Joaquin Phoenix). Since it’s an election year, and since Joe opposes every idea Ted has, Joe decides to run against him. The political discourse splits the town in half, and everyone’s secrets are about to be revealed.
Now, there is one more thing that viewers can expect from an Ari Aster movie, and that’s that it will not be brief. The running time of Eddington is about two and a half hours, so there’s way more to the story than simple political campaigning. And since it’s set in the volatile social climate of May of 2020, the big issues being dealt with are COVID and Black Lives Matter, and you can guess which side of the fence both Ted and Joe fall on in regards to masking and protesting.
It’s less clear what side of the fence Ari Aster falls on, though. Eddington is probably the most serious satire ever committed to film, and both political sides come off as looking cartoonish and stereotypical. Joe’s anti-masking rants and the conspiracy theories of his mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell from The Penguin) sound just as ridiculous as Ted’s COVID precautions and the civics-class verbal regurgitation of the teenage BLM protesters. Whichever side the viewer leans to politically, Eddington is bound to trigger, because Aster makes both sides look a bit ignorant.
Politics aside, Eddington does get messy. Not narratively messy, but guts and gore messy. There’s plenty of murder and mayhem, and plenty of blood and betrayal. As the movie goes on, it gets more and more outlandish and far-fetched. By the end, it’s absolutely clear that Aster is poking fun at these topics, just in case anyone had been taking the inherent messaging of the characters a bit too seriously. And at that point, everything turns into a grindhouse revisionist spaghetti western.
Ari Aster is at the period in his career where he’s hip and happening enough to be able to command a top-notch cast, and so, Eddington has one. In addition to Phoenix and Pascal, the ensemble includes Emma Stone (Poor Things) as Sheriff’s Joe’s wife, Austin Butler (Elvis) as a weird self-help guru/cult leader, Michael Ward (The Book of Clarence), and Luke Grimes (the Fifty Shades of Grey movies) as Joe’s deputies, Matt Gomez Hidaka (Silo) as Mayor Ted’s son, and Amélie Hoeferle (Night Swim) as one of the socially conscious BLM protestors. All of these feel like bit parts in a world that belongs to Ted and Joe, but there are no small parts in Eddington. These characters all have limited screen time, but they’re pivotal and important to the dense, well-crafted story.
It’s unclear if Eddington actually has an opinion, and that may be Aster’s point. It functions as a nice little time capsule of mid-2020, when the country as a whole was in turmoil, and it concentrates its focus on the microcosm of one tiny little town that, even in the middle of the New Mexico desert, is still affected heavily by the world around it. People are going to see what they want to see in Eddington. Some will see it as right-wing propaganda, some will see it as leftist rhetoric, and still others will just see it as simply a compelling revisionist western. And the true beauty of Eddington is that everyone will be right.
GRADE: B+
Rating: R
Release Date: July 18, 2025
Running Time: 2 hours 28 minutes
Studio: A24
