Movie Review: Eddington
Is it too soon to make a COVID-19 movie? While the virus that overtook the world back in 2020 has been featured in a few films over the last five years, whether directly like in Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi or Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which found our characters working from home, isolating, and wearing masks, or allegorically like in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, where the characters are quarantined after coming into contact with an alien, writer/director Ari Aster puts the virus front and center in Eddington, a neo-western and biting satire about the state of modern America.
Eddington takes place in May 2020, during the height of the pandemic, in the small town of Eddington, New Mexico. It’s the kind of place that has one grocery store, one bar, and a police squad of only three officers. A large tech company is planning to build a high-tech data center, which is said to be financially prosperous for the 2,435 residents. The corporate investors of this tech company need Eddington Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) to help get everything approved for them to build their monstrous facility. Ted is a charming mayor who follows the COVID-19 mask and occupancy guidelines while also being a favorite amongst the town.
Following a mishap with a homeless person at Ted’s bar and an incident at a grocery store involving a maskless patron, Ted finds himself going toe to toe with the town sheriff, Joe Cross (a spectacular Joaquin Phoenix), notably against a lot of the COVID guidelines, and constantly going online and reading social media. Joe, who always seems on the verge of snapping, decides to run against Ted in the upcoming mayoral election, which sets off a string of unexpected and chaotic events.
Since his debut film, Hereditary, in 2018, Aster has established himself as a master of suspense, discomfort, and unpredictability. You never know where an Aster movie is going, which is one of the many reasons why he is one of the great young auteurs we have working in cinema today. Eddington is no different. From the opening moments, where we see a dirty, salivating, coughing, maskless homeless man muttering to himself as he walks towards Eddington, you squirm a little in your seat. As the movie progresses, you squirm a little more while inching closer to the edge of your chair. By about the 90-minute mark, when the film’s first true “holy shit” moment (a staple of Aster films) happens, your heart is racing, and you are firmly on the edge of your seat, and don’t leave the rest of the film.
Aster harnesses the emotions of living in America in 2020 into a two-and-a-half-hour movie. Between COVID, the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing protests, the leadership of the country, the election and the debates between the candidates and the voters online, and everything in between, a lot was going on in 2020, and with that came a whirlwind of emotions. Eddington is a true snapshot of America during this time, and Aster captures the fear, anxiety, tension, and confusion we felt, and even sprinkles in a good amount of humor as well. This is easily Aster’s funniest film to date. There are some funny line deliveries and physical comedy moments, but most of the comedy comes from some of the smaller moments that highlight just how surreal and bizarre 2020 was. Things like fights over masks, white teenagers protesting a Black man’s death so they can impress a girl, and the conspiracy theories people came up with are just a few of the things that will make you laugh because of how uncomfortably real it is. Aster masterfully balances the tones of Eddington and blends them in a way that makes the movie disturbing and uncomfortable, but also funny and entertaining.
Watching Eddington now, in 2025, it’s an undeniably great film and one of the year’s best. But, I’m interested in seeing what the film will look like five years from now, or ten or twenty years from now. It’s a fascinating film because it’s a perfect time capsule of COVID-era America, but also holds its own as a film about a deranged man driven by ego and power, which seems even more relevant in the American culture of 2025. Eddington is a spectacular modern Western and could end up being one of the defining films of the 2020s.
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