Eddington: Review

Director: Ari Aster

Writer: Ari Aster Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Deirdre O'Connell, Emma Stone, Pedro Pascal

Trailer

Eddington is a horror film. Not with jump-scares or boogeymen, but the suffocating reality of watching society crumble under lies, cover-ups and horrible advancements as pretenses for the greater good.

It's a horror film masquerading as a genre blend of a Western, a Comedy, and a low-key political drama based during the COVID pandemic, at the height of Black Lives Matter, that's saturated in a multitude of plot points that twist and turn until we reach the ending that we were never ready for.

Set in a fictional American town during the height of COVID lockdowns and civil unrest, Eddington follows a small-town Sheriff and a progressive Mayor as their ideological feud escalates into an unravelling of truth, identity, and morality.

Ari Aster is known for his bleakness, with Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau is Afraid at his helm, there's no doubt that he was going to bring emotional turmoil to the table. Aster is a master of tension, starting the movie with nothing more than a rivalry between Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) over masking mandates and a deep-seated personal animosity, the film delves into darker tones as the political landscape over our actual pandemic heightened: from conspiracy theories of the legitimacy of Covid-19, to the tensions and aftermaths of George Floyd's murder and the lingering air of ACAB. It's a satire with a real basis in reality, and the humour is dark, near stomach-churning in a way that forces us to look back in time during Covid protocols and relive the collective trauma of 2020, the collective societal downfall, the lethal spread of misinformation and the unstoppable political antipathy that plagued American society during that era.

Joaquin Phoenix is phenomenal as Joe, the empathetic, obtuse Sheriff of the town who refuses to obey the mask mandate, citing that his asthma makes it nearly impossible to breathe in his mask (as a fellow asthmatic, it does not), he believes the citizens of his town are participating in performative fear of the coronavirus. On the contrary, Mayor Ted just wants his people to follow the mandate, citing the scientific basis for wearing a mask, and handling the confrontation between him and Joe with elegance. This temperament sparks Joe to announce his running for Mayor against Ted, and thus comes the two campaigns - Joe's marketing an infringement of rights, and Ted, calling for more diversity and protocols as a mask for his true agenda: incorporating a massive Artificial Intelligence facility.

Eddington is layered with meaning, from mental illness to political savviness that is both authentic and performative. Aster does an excellent job writing his characters that represent both the real and the false ideology during BLM and fighting for justice. There's Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), an angry white-girl who knows her stance in the political landscape and uses her anger to fuel her fight against injustice, and there's Brian (Cameron Mann), whose entire persona in the protesting is dedicated to hooking up with her. Aster did this to show just how easily social justice can be appropriated.

Emma Stone is not wasted in her role as Joe's wife, Louise; she's such a fantastic actress that she can do a lot with a little. Louise has a history with Ted, something that is hinted to be the catalyst for her current mental state and eventually becomes the sub-plot of a fringe of conspiracy theories, abuse and influencers and the eventual basis of Joe's cracking, because nothing is more terrifying than a white figurehead with access to firearms. Dawn, Louise's mother, played by Deirdre O'Connell, evokes a grim and harrowing disposition of the pandemic, not because she ultimately believes the conspiracy theories, but because her cynical viewpoint is directly influenced by her abusive nature.

Trying to unpack this movie in one review is damn near impossible. The layers and layers of commentary fold into each other. As the film progresses, the darkness unfolds with it. We have no heroes. No anti-heroes. We aren't rooting for anyone, and yet we cannot stop our eyes from watching the movie play out.

Darius Khondji does an incredible job with the cinematography in this film. From shaky cameras to wide lens shots and close-ups of faces that create unfathomable tension. The colour grading is as bleak as the movie, providing the Western feel at the beginning and looming in darkness as the movie descends into horror. The score by The Haxan Cloak and Darius Khondji creates nothing but tension throughout the whole film, but much like the cinematography, it too takes on a darker role as the movie continues.

Ari Aster’s Eddington is the most daring film he’s made yet. Genre-bending, pandemic-haunted, and morally disorienting, it asks us to stare directly into the collective American breakdown of 2020 without flinching. Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal go head-to-head in one of the most tense ideological showdowns since There Will Be Blood, and Emma Stone proves once again that subtle roles can be just as devastating. This isn’t horror with ghosts. It's horror in our reality, done with dark humour, just sharp enough to make you feel uneasy the whole time.

4/5