Ari Aster’s uncomfortable satire, starring Pedro Pascal and Joaquin Phoenix, is incredibly resonant, especially after the Charlie Kirk shooting.<\/b>
\nIf any 2025 movie will be viewed in the future as a classic that was misunderstood in its time, it\u2019s surely Ari Aster\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s movie reverberated with that event with unnerving prescience, and it absolutely floored me. If you\u2019re looking for a film that grapples honestly with the ugly psychodrama of the present moment in America, look no further.
That doesn\u2019t sound like a lot of fun, which may be one reason audiences stayed away. But while Eddington is sobering, it\u2019s actually fun, too. True to Aster\u2019s form, it\u2019s tense, shocking, gruesome, and mordantly funny. It\u2019s not a horror movie, like Hereditary or Midsommar, and it\u2019s not a picaresque odyssey through cringe comedy, like Aster\u2019s 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.
The story is set in the small town of Eddington, New Mexico, where sheriff Joe Cross (Joker star Joaquin Phoenix, MAGA-coded) clashes with mayor Ted Garcia (The Mandalorian star Pedro Pascal, Bill Clinton-coded) over mask mandates and the construction of a new data center. Ornery and frustrated, as much by his home life with his withdrawn wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her conspiracy-theorist mother Dawn (Deirdre O\u2019Connell) as by work or politics, Joe impulsively decides to run against Garcia in the mayoral election. Tensions mount as the local youths mount Black Lives Matter protests and Louise and Dawn get mixed up with an insinuating cult leader (Austin Butler). When the conflict between Joe and Ted comes to a head, Eddington topples into a series of brutal twists.
Aster confronts this material with an unsparing eye that takes wickedly funny potshots at participants from every side: The movie\u2019s best jokes come at the expense of the young, virtue-signaling, overwhelmingly white leftists. The blanket both-sides-suck cynicism could easily come off as wearyingly adolescent, and it certainly put many critics off.
But Aster isn\u2019t peddling the evasive centrism of a movie like Alex Garland\u2019s Civil War, and he\u2019s not disengaged from the setting or the characters. Far from it. Aster is from New Mexico, knows the milieu intimately, and traveled the state interviewing local (mostly right-wing) sheriffs and public officials while he was writing the script. There\u2019s a deep, empathetic humanism underpinning Eddington that balances its burn-it-all attitude, and it\u2019s embodied in Phoenix\u2019s surprisingly subtle performance as Cross.
Like all Aster\u2019s films, Eddington runs a bit too long, and not all its subplots come into full focus. But through it all, Aster\u2019s filmmaking is measured and commanding. He evokes the style of the great Westerns in the classically lush cinematography (by the great Darius Khondji) and score (by Daniel Pemberton and Bobby Krlic).
The most arresting thing about the movie is the precision with which it pins down its moment in the culture, boxing in the characters and the wide-open landscape with invasive screen borders, doomscrolling chatter, and an ambient drone of untethered, conspiratorial slop. For all Aster\u2019s refusal to point fingers politically \u2014 or rather, his glee in pointing them absolutely everywhere \u2014 the movie\u2019s final shot leaves you in no doubt about who, or what, he thinks is to blame for our modern malaise.
I get it; a movie in which mask mandates, BLM protests, pedophile conspiracies, and seemingly every major bummer from the news headlines of the past decade are important plot points is a hard sell. And there\u2019s that old chestnut about smartphones not being cinematic. But a generation of filmmakers have been hiding in the past and in fantasy for too long, and there comes a point where we need our art to confront our reality and shine a light on it.
Happily, that seems to be happening. Eddington makes a fascinating companion to two of 2025\u2019s other best films, One Battle After Another and Bugonia (which Aster also produced). Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s film is more hopeful than Eddington; Yorgos Lanthimos\u2019 is more precise in its metaphor, if equally ambivalent as Aster\u2019s movie about picking sides. But all three are gripping, politically energized movies with the grit of contemporaneity under their fingernails. This is a thrilling moment in cinema \u2014 and now, hopefully, Eddington can take its rightful place at the heart of it.
Eddington is now streaming on HBO Max, and available to rent or buy on Apple, Amazon, and other digital services.<\/p>\n