Eddington (2025)

Ari Aster returns to our screen with something completely different once more, after 2023's lengthy and divisive Beau is Afraid. Eddington, just like Aster's predecessor, has split critics and audiences more or less straight down the middle. In fact, one of Britain's most famous film critics has described Eddington as "not as clever as it thinks it is."

I disagree. I think Eddington is an extremely knowing and astute piece of work; a political satire that can be interpreted in many different ways depending where you fall on the political divide.

Joaquin Phoenix once again provides Aster with his lead, this time as Eddington's town sheriff in the strange and foreign time of 2019, with COVID about to hit big time, and many towns and states- including the one that borders Eddington already enforcing mask wearing, social distancing, and- as a result- civil unrest. The film opens with Phoenix's Joe Cross in his patrol car just over the state lines, where he's accosted by another police wagon housing two masked policemen- telling him he needs to wear his mask because where he is falls under their jurisdiction.

From this opening scene, you're in one of a few camps. The fact that he must supposedly wear a mask inside his own car had me howling with laughter at the absurdity of the situation, but the laughter quickly subsided when I remembered that we were all party to this- doing exactly what we were told by the world's governments and media without questioning any of it.

Of course there are millions who would take the same approach all over again if and when this sort of thing happens once more, and both these sets of people is why Eddington works. Many people who were self appointed justice warriors over COVID restrictions were behaving as such without any medical or scientific proof- simply believing what they said- while others questioned absolutely everything, because they were simply being told to do things by people who they had no reason whatsoever to trust.

And this leads on to other things that Aster weaves into the narrative- Black Lives Matter protests within the city's confines, bringing in the idea of Antifa militant groups preaching violence against fascism, all set among the backdrop of real news events glimpsed on television screens; the George Floyd killing by white police officers, social justice warriors protesting anything and everything they can take a stand against (Aster sagaciously intersects the idea of a young boy having a crush on a girl who spouts regurgitated speeches during protests which he then repeats for the rest of the film- not to make a point, but perhaps to anger both the right and left).

Cross decides to run for mayor against Pedro Pascal's Ted Garcia after a run in with him at a supermarket where people aren't being let in to feed themselves without a mask (one resident can't because of his asthma so he's discarded by societal ruling, despite the fact in Eddington they're not official rules yet), and announces his candidacy on social media.

From here the film follows the pair of them as well as Garcia's insufferable son and the other two police officers in the sheriff's department, and there are other minor characters dispersed throughout the action, with a pretty vague plot.

Eddington has left a lot of people scratching their heads, some with frustration, some with confusion. And some are actively angry about it- but this is probably the best part. Despite the fact that Aster is intelligent enough to not reveal a side to be cheering for (if indeed you want or need to), those that are infuriated by it are simply too foolish to understand who or what is being lampooned here.

It's you. You're being lampooned.

I laughed out loud repeatedly during Eddington, and many times it was at myself, at how it resonated with my own culpability of the lunacy unfurling in our world five years ago, in every respect. That's not to do a disservice to the severity of situation, it's to do with my toeing the line in every aspect and just assuming what I was being told was truth.

Aster is at pains to paint a picture of the mess of the world today, and the fact that Eddington is messy as a film, is sort of the point. It doesn't all hang together; at two and half hours it really stretches its points and is at least a half hour too long, with the final stretch being fairly dull- right up until the climax and credits which brings this whole comment of a film nicely to a conclusion.

It feels like Aster is conducting a social experiment in some ways, offering us a piece of unsubtle political and social satire, as we look back on a time that some would see as a constructed social experiment. And some would not.

So whatever comment Eddington is making- if indeed it is making one- is very much up to the viewer. And that's why Eddington works. And if it does think it's cleverer than it is, then the fact that you perhaps think that in the first place means it absolutely is.

7.8/10