Director: Ari Aster
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O’Connell, Micheal Ward, Austin Butler, Emma Stone
Rating: (R16)
★★★★+
REVIEWED BY AMASIO JUTEL
Eddington (Rialto) is an absurdly realist Covid-era conspiracy thriller from Ari Aster, revealing our doomscrolling alienation as we retreat into our individual algorithms until we no longer recognise our neighbours. The cartoonishly heightened film charts the paranoia that Covid-19 embedded just under the surface of society, asking: What do Black Lives Matter protests look like in a town without any Black people? Does Antifa run the world? And is there any truth to numerology?
The film opens in May 2020 in the fictional town of Eddington. Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross, an uncomfortably sympathetic, weary sheriff who becomes an unlikely political candidate after rejecting the "authoritarian" mandates surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic. Joe, who lives with his shell-shocked wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her terminally online, Q-curious mother Dawn (Deidre O’Connell), faces off against incumbent mayor Ted Garcia (a perfectly smug Pedro Pascal).
As a conspiracy thriller, Eddington burrows into the American subconscious in ways that are both hilarious and unnerving. Aster’s gun-toting libertarians occupy the same umbrella of alienation as 5G brainwave cultists and the teenage "white abolitionists" with Instagram handles like @black.lives.eddington.brian — spiralling down algorithmic echo chambers where neighbour no longer recognises neighbour.
Although this style is a new look for him — a fashionable film form of conspiratorial cartoonish social satire — Aster hasn’t abandoned the Paimon crown and prairie dresses he once donned. The castration anxiety and marital impotence of the title character in Aster’s Beau Is Afraid are immediately evident in Joe’s YouTube watch habits ("How To Convince Your Husband or Wife to Have a Baby [5 STEPS!]"). The unsettling communal dread cum hysteria of Midsommar is rife in the Eddington community. And by the final act, Aster dials everything up to all-out terror — the dim cinematic quality of his 2018 film Hereditary in a neo-Western shootout on Main Street.
Aster paints Eddington as a collage of visual and thematic references. There’s the small-town political corruption of Chinatown, so Joe shares a surname with John Huston’s menacing Noah Cross. Gun violence in America, the proliferation of assault and sniper rifles, and the underlying failure to address mental health issues of those who own them, allude to Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets. There’s a similar thread in Robert Altman’s Nashville, which also examines the intersecting national identities of a cultural moment, and the examination of morality familiar from No Country for Old Men, or any number of Coen Brothers movies. The list goes on.
One could also point to the naive politics of disinformation and erosion of democracy in The Social Dilemma, which might have been on Aster’s mind as something he could use to satirise the chronically online mother-in-law and the political awakening of the young liberal faction of the town. But listing references is lazy journalism, and Eddington speaks to so much more. It’s in the movie’s singularity that it defines itself.
No other film has agonisingly captured the confused, apocalyptic texture of early-pandemic America this precisely. The fear of contamination — not just viral, but ideological — permeates every frame. All the while, out of the public eye, Garcia is partnering with Big Tech to erect an AI data centre ("solidgoldmagikarp") on local land. The irony? It’s the real threat. And these paranoid fantasies — the protesters, paedophile rings, cultists and megaphone-blaring trucks — are its manifestations.
