Ari Aster’s uncomfortable satire, starring Pedro Pascal and Joaquin Phoenix, is incredibly resonant, especially after the Charlie Kirk shooting.
If any 2025 movie will be viewed in the future as a classic that was misunderstood in its time, it’s surely Ari Aster’s Eddington, now streaming on HBO Max. A neo-Western crossed with a political satire from the director of Hereditary and Midsommar, set during the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, Eddington is a thorny, provocative film that pours salt in some of the rawest wounds of recent memory. It seems designed to make viewers uncomfortable, regardless of their political alignment. Its critical reception was confused, bordering on hostile, and it bombed at the box office. But it’s only getting better and more trenchant, almost by the day.
To the point: I first saw Eddington in September, four months after its Cannes premiere, two months after its U.S. theatrical release, and by some dark coincidence, one day after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Aster’s movie reverberated with that event with unnerving prescience, and it absolutely floored me. If you’re looking for a film that grapples honestly with the ugly psychodrama of the present moment in America, look no further.
That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, which may be one reason audiences stayed away. But while Eddington is sobering, it’s actually fun, too. True to Aster’s form, it’s tense, shocking, gruesome, and mordantly funny. It’s not a horror movie, like Hereditary or Midsommar, and it’s not a picaresque odyssey through cringe comedy, like Aster’s Beau is Afraid, although it has some elements of both. It starts as a relatively straight drama, but crawls implacably into a surreal realm of high satire and bloody, bullet-riddled action.
