As some of you are aware I am an avowed triple-A (Ari Aster Appreciator). I loved his two hit horror movies (HEREDITARY and MIDSOMMAR) and then I loved his flop comedy (BEAU IS AFRAID) even more, so obviously I was gonna see his new one EDDINGTON no matter what. When it was announced it was described as a western, which is a stretch – nobody would put this in the westerns section at a video store. But yeah, it has feuds and jurisdictional disagreements between a small town sheriff, the mayor and the Native law enforcement just over the border, trouble in a bar, various groups trying to profit from a big construction project, things devolving into a big shootout. I get it.
Of Aster’s other movies it’s closest to BEAU, but it’s less surreal and, to me at least, not nearly as funny. In fact it might’ve made me laugh less than any of them. But there are certainly some good ones in there and I did laugh just thinking about some of its ideas while discussing it with friends.
What it definitely does achieve is a stressful portrait of what our lives have become in the last half decade. It’s set in May of 2020 and begins with a series of confrontations over mask ordinances. Eddington, New Mexico Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix, U TURN) doesn’t want to wear a mask when officers from the Pueblo tribe insist he follow the law in their jurisdiction. Later he forces a grocery store to allow in a guy who refuses to mask (James Cady, “Train Conductor,” HOSTILES). Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal, THE EQUALIZER 2) happens to be there and tries to calmly reason with Joe, who then goes outside and does a livestream announcing that he’s running against him in the next election.
The movie is full of loaded scenarios to make some of us squirm – it’s practically boobytrapped. Because we know now that wearing a mask outside isn’t important, it seems goofy to be treating it as such a grave matter. But they didn’t know it then, so obviously the sheriff should exercise caution for the safety of his community and also set an example by following the state ordinance. He’s even more out of line at the grocery store because the other customers have a right to feel/be safe while getting the food they need. I’m not gonna change my mind on this, the people who refused to do a very small thing to help slow down a disease that killed millions (and still isn’t done) were wrong, and it kinda feels like I’m siding with those assholes when I catch myself laughing at the other guys for going a little overboard in their mask compliance. I get why some people took EDDINGTON as some kind of “both sides” South Park bullshit, but I don’t think that gets the movie right. And I like that it makes me sit in my discomfort knowing it’s pushing my buttons, not some imaginary other person’s I think I’m better than.
Even touchier issue: the murder of George Floyd is acknowledged in the course of the movie, and the BLM movement (“Blacks Lives Matter,” according to Officer Guy [Luke Grimes, TAKEN 2]) reaches Eddington. A small group of passionate young people picket an empty street, and the mayor’s son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka, Silo) and his friend Brian (Cameron Mann, A VERY MERRY TOY STORE) start competing to be the most radical to impress social justice activist Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle, NIGHT SWIM). She used to date a cop, Michael (Micheal Ward, THE OLD GUARD), who is Black so they presumptuously tell him to join their protest. They’re prone to yelling things about stolen land and white supremacy that aren’t always germane, and I really laughed when Brian stepped up to a microphone to make a speech that he said he shouldn’t even be making because he should be listening to people of color which is what he’ll do as soon as he’s done speaking.
And all this is true, but… See, many young people become very militant as they start growing up and learning about the wrongs of the world. Some of them are smarter than me, others can be loud mouths about things they don’t understand that well, they can be annoyingly strident, they can get into a movement for the wrong reasons. But that can be true of anyything – movie discussion, bird watching, sports; only in left wing activism does it get used to dismiss the entire movement. Nobody says rock ’n roll is trash because somebody learned guitar just to impress girls. So to me jokes about protesters can feel like somebody making fun of an annoying friend – hey, only I get to do that. I can laugh at some goofy shit at a protest, we’re still right that the war is wrong, that the president is a deranged criminal, that cops keep killing Black people without accountability. Broadly speaking throughout American history the youth movements have been correct, even if somebody was silly about it. Today we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that there were many hippies who absolutely sucked, and also that they were obviously fucking right about the Vietnam War!
But I think EDDINGTON knows this. Sheriff Joe doesn’t seem entirely out of line when he chuckles at this protest in front of nobody and is befuddled about how their slogans apply to a department that’s just him and a couple other guys. Then he tries to clear them out anyway! Why does he care? Because that’s what cops do. They escalate. We also hear tell of past racial and excessive force incidents and witness some new ones. Joe thinks discussing systemic racism makes no since because it doesn’t happen here. He also thinks following Covid safety rules is dumb because nobody here has Covid. And you can imagine where that goes.
Anyway, I enjoyed the later scenes where cops and citizens panic that “THE RIOTS ARE HERE!” when the small crowd of picketers grows to a slightly larger small crowd of picketers (plus some counter-protesters with a Blue Lives Matter flag).
More than the summer 2020 issues already mentioned, this is a movie about conspiracy theories. It opens with the town’s one derelict spitting and ranting about the data center and who knows what. That’s all he does, walk around yelling and occasionally breaking a window at the bar to steal a drink. His name is Lodge and I had no clue he was played by Clifton Collins Jr. (FORTRESS, THE REPLACEMENT KILLERS, MINDHUNTERS). In a sadly very true to life depiction the ostensibly liberal and mostly reasonable mayor calls the sheriff on Lodge and even though Joe hates Ted and argues about it he ultimately does all he knows to do with a mentally ill person, which is try to rough him up. It never occurs to either of these two to try to figure out how to help the guy.
The other thing that’s very sadly true is that Ted’s main political focus seems to be meetings to push through the Solidgoldmagikarp Data Center being built on shared land between Eddington and the Pueblo. This is a problem we have in supposedly progressive Seattle, I see it in New York, I see it with so many elected Democrats: they share or claim to share many of our political goals, but in the end they’re beholden to land developers and corporations that don’t want what we want.
Joe and Ted’s feud has roots in past scandal, some of it never fully illuminated to us. Ted seems like mostly a good guy but he lets his asshole side out when he’s with his financial advisor (King Orba, “Railroad Enforcer,” 3:10 TO YUMA). Joe leans belligerent but this is that moment before MAGA had swallowed the entire right wing, when there was still incentive to seem like a caring, empathetic person even if you were a cop or a Republican. So publicly he keeps saying that the death of George Floyd was a tragedy, privately he keeps asking a confused Michael if he’s “okay,” and also gives him an unexpected promotion while not-convincingly denying it “has anything to do with the news.”
His family life is also unusual enough to humanize him. His wife Louise (Emma Stone, THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN) is nice, artistically talented, also psychologically troubled. Her mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell, SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK) has been living with them and is 24-7 obsessed with conspiracy articles which she verbally summarizes to Louise, sends to her in email and also gives her print-offs of. Joe and Louise are exhausted by her but as Louise humors her she starts to believe more and more of the stuff too. (One conspiracy she does not unravel is that the orders she keeps getting for her weird art come from the sheriff’s department, possibly with tax dollars?)
Communication is important in a marriage. But Louise found out Joe was running for mayor from seeing it on the internet, and he later causes a major scandal by deciding she was abused by Ted and announcing it at a press conference, which she disagrees with and responds to by posting a video. Joe is also annoyed by people recording him to try to incriminate the police, while he records his own interactions with Ted. Because EDDINGTON is basically The Internet (derogatory) come to life, Louise and her mom not only become followers of a weird internet guru, but show up with him at the house. Austin Butler (THE DEAD DON’T DIE) plays Vernon Jefferson Peak and I’m unclear what his whole deal is other than he oozes sexuality and rock star swagger while telling his story of escaping a horrific child trafficking ring. If I wasn’t already sold on Butler from ELVIS and THE BIKERIDERS this would’ve done it because he just draws your attention, you can’t stop watching him even when he’s not the one talking. I swear he has cult leader magnetism for real. And the scene made me realize that while I would be skeptical of those claims in real life I have no idea if they’re real within the movie. Any of this could be, or all of it, or none of it. We have no shared reality.
It’s interesting though that when Dawn, who talks about conspiracies all day, meets specific people saying that something happened to them, it’s too much for her and she has to excuse herself. I guess she prefers it at a distance.
BEAU is long and comically punishing, but benefits from a sort of chapter structure – a section in the city, then the suburbs, then the woods. EDDINGTON sticks to this one town, but pinging between different characters who themselves ping between different conflicts and rabbit holes. But there’s a turning point where things get violent and Oh Shit It’s On. Despite the satirical nature of the whole thing the deaths are serious and upsetting. Without specifics I will SPOILER that Joe commits some horrific crimes and tries to blame them on protesters. I wasn’t thinking contemporary western, I was thinking neo-noir as it turned into a question of whether Pueblo Officer Butterfly Jimenez (William Belleau, BLOOD QUANTUM), who gets involved because a shot was fired from Pueblo land, will be able to prove the suspicions he clearly has at the crime scene. I love when a movie has a character like Officer Butterfly who’s not in it much but quietly steals the movie for a while late in the game.
Big change of subject here but I want to note that the director of photography is Darius Khondji, whose past works include DELICATESSEN, THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN, SE7EN, EVITA, OKJA, and UNCUT GEMS. A genius. This one isn’t as flashy as some of those but I have seen it noted (and made fun of for being noted) that he found very effective ways to frame, for example, Joe’s phone mounted on his dashboard so that it can be an interesting shot even when it’s showing us videos and comments and hashtags and shit. It works.
I listened to Aster on WTF with Marc Maron and also with Bill Hader on the A24 Podcast. He says this was a contemporary western script he wrote before HEREDITARY but had never quite been happy with, and then after 2020 when he was trying to write a story about what these times feel like he rewrote the script with that in mind. I hope this isn’t too self-indulgent to bring up but it reminds me of what I was trying to do with my first not-read-by-very-many-people self published novel Niketown. I had all these ideas for expressing how crazy things felt in the Bush era, and I tried to combine them with my version of a crime novel. I’m proud of that book but since I started with the feeling and figured out a story to fit it there’s kind of a rambling feel to it. When I did my second book I was much more insistent on nailing down a strong structure – that’s what I prefer. So that sort of explains why I like EDDINGTON but (on one viewing anyway) don’t love it.
Or maybe I do? It’s a thinker. It gets in there and jostles around. I may have to see it again.
P.S.
SUPER SPOILER SECTION:
Part of the conceit of BEAU was to make all the most unreasonable fears of its title character real, and I saw a political edge to its exaggeratedly nightmarish depiction of urban living, since the worst people in American politics have convinced their dumbest marks that that shit is a documentary. For the most part EDDINGTON does not use that gimmick but there’s a huge exception late in the movie, when suddenly we cut to a private jet filled with mysterious radical leftists. At some point I wondered if this was not real within the movie, but an expression of Joe’s delusions. No, they turn out to be heavily armed Antifa Super Soldiers flying around to burn down police stations and kill cops and shit.
Again, this is poking at my sensitivities, throwing in this higher level of absurdity after the movie had seemingly shifted into serious mode. It bothers me when RAMBO: LAST BLOOD or SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO use preposterous scenarios that mirror right wing propaganda, because I worry that it reinforces that bullshit for some people. In this instance I love it though, this is one of the parts that hits as rare and deeply funny a tone as my favorite bits in BEAU. With a straight face (and scary intonations in the score by Daniel Pemberton and Bobby Krlic) Aster depicts this thing that was widely feared by dummies on Facebook, and we get to see how fucking ludicrous it looks. In the epilogue it’s funny to hear people referencing “the antifa terrorist attacks” of 2020, like a famous tragedy we all know about. Because it’s 2025 and we don’t. And are they even talking about antifa anymore? They got the fa and stopped worrying about the anti.
There’s so much grim humor in the way things end up – Dawn passing herself off somewhat as a normal politician but still launching into her conspiracy rants, well-intentioned Brian unwittingly helping the sheriff frame a Black man for murder, then shooting somebody and being happy to pivot to right wing influencer. I kinda thought the point was that all these people are fighting each other and in the end they got a data center that’s gonna pollute their home six ways to Sunday. But are we supposed to believe them when they claim it’s solar and wind powered? I don’t know. Either way I guess it all comes down to storing more of this data that adds so much magic to their lives. Just what they need.
August 8th, 2025 at 5:33 pm
As I’ve mentioned before, I used to be fond of saying that there were some movies that I was so disinterested in, movies that were so obviously Not For Me, that I wouldn’t watch them if you paid me. “Not for money,” I’d say.
Now, I know better. We live in a capitalist hellscape, and I, like everything else, can be bought. But I’m not cheap. The longer this review went on, the higher the price went.
This is a $950 movie. A new record.
Oh shit, I just checked IMDb and it’s two and a half hours long. Because of course it is. The price just went up. $1150 and not a penny less. Believe me, I’d be earning every cent.
I accept PayPal or Amazon gift cards.