Eddington is not supposed to be a horror movie. This might be a surprise to fans of the writer-director also responsible for the demented supernatural family drama Hereditary and the Wicker Man–esque neo-pagan nightmare Midsommar. Yet Ari Aster’s deranged mélange of take-no-prisoners social commentary, psychological thriller, and revisionist Western opens with information that may prove just as unsettling to viewers as possessed relatives and murderous cultists, if not more so: “Late May 2020.”
Yes, for his latest feature, Aster returns to a world only a few years removed from ours but that somehow already feels like an alternative reality: the height of COVID-19 lockdowns and the various pathologies and madnesses associated with them. It is a world that, up to this point, cinema has largely eschewed treating fully—perhaps a reflection of the popular desire to forget that period. But Aster skillfully wrenches us back in—whether we want to go back or not. Though some of its contrivances may fall short, Eddington’s bold bewilderment places it at the forefront of the nascent genre of COVID retrospection.
Eddington takes place in a small, fictional New Mexico town of the same name. By May 2020, COVID the virus has barely touched it. Yet COVID the social phenomenon has. An early confrontation between town sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and town mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) sets the tone for roughly the first half of the movie. Cross, who bristles against COVID mitigation measures, stands outside a bar trying to speak to a masked Garcia, obeying and enforcing state mandates while standing inside. One indelible frame shows a profile view of them on opposite sides of the bar’s window, shouting at each other. Their rivalry elevates when Cross decides to run for mayor against Garcia on an anti-lockdown platform. Like many aspects of COVID, it may be forgotten now, but such conflicts between freedom and “safety” happened all over the country during the era of “an abundance of caution.”
The antagonism between Cross and Garcia superficially imitates the showdowns and standoffs seen in classic Westerns. Yet it is deliberately undercut by the foibles of both men. Aster has a keen eye for such flaws. Cross may be motivated by a noble desire to return life to normalcy, but he is also seduced into internet rabbit holes and proves an inadequate husband. Garcia may just want to keep his community safe and stable, but he is also beholden to local business interests and susceptible (whether genuinely or merely opportunistically) to the oppressive and omnipresent left-wing bromides that circulated during that awful period, especially after George Floyd’s death. It is unclear whether Aster intended it, but casting the omnipresent crowd-pleaser Pascal in this role brilliantly (and perhaps devastatingly) subverts his public image. Neither man is a paragon of virtue. There are no John Waynes or Gary Coopers in Eddington.
These central characters are only part of Aster’s ruthless recollections of peak COVID, however. Members of Cross’s family fall into even deeper rabbit holes than he does. Garcia’s son joins the hordes of unoccupied youth. Before Floyd’s death, they congregate listlessly in small groups outdoors, engaging in furtive social interaction. And after it, finally given something to do, they assemble, march, and riot, full of unwarranted confidence in their sense of grievance and injustice—unless they’re just trying to get a girl. Tense confrontations between masked and unmasked Eddingtonians occur in grocery stores and restaurants while exasperated small-business owners fruitlessly try to calm down and ultimately just berate Black Lives Matter protesters, who tell their families and a black law-enforcement officer that they’re on the wrong side. And throughout it all, everyone processes reality through his or her phone or computer.
Aster’s critical catalogue of the COVID catastrophe is sufficiently evenhanded that it transcends any kind of partisan point-scoring. It becomes, rather, an appropriately cynical portrait of the warping of human nature. Even so, Eddington takes for granted certain conclusions that would have been controversial then—and still are now for some. For example, that BLM fervor was not entirely sincere and may instead have been largely a product of the bored, idle young. That keeping the young bored and idle for so long was idiotic even if technological advances made it feasible. And, above all, that it was delusional to believe humans, naturally social creatures, could endure for so long starved of genuine contact and interaction with others. During the COVID fever dream, many actively denied these obvious truths. We are still suffering the consequences.
All this unfolds against the backdrop of the conflict between Cross and Garcia. But there is more—much more—to Eddington than that. Aster takes the fearsome, cloistered reality of COVID to a different and somehow much weirder place. An enigmatic concatenation of forces descends upon the town. Defying these invaders, a bedeviled Cross may appear to have become the Western hero he surely wishes to be, if only for a few eerie nocturnal moments—and regardless of whether he has earned the status.
The COVID madness brought and enabled strange and downright unsettling things: “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests; looting; antifa aggression; attacks on statues and courthouses; autonomous collectives occupying vast chunks of major cities. But whether the exacerbated, perfervid vision that takes hold through Eddington’s climax successfully recaptures the peak of this madness will depend on whether you think that using the titular town as a hyperbolic violent parable, a place where prominent citizens fall victim to premeditated violence while trained, masked gunmen leave a trail of explosions and bodies in their wake, conveys the sheer weirdness of COVID phenomena, or whether you think that blowing the grotesquerie up beyond recognizability cheapens the very real but typically more mundane repression and discomfort most faced during that time.
I lean more toward the latter view. But this does not negate what Aster has accomplished with Eddington. He has not only delivered a true-to-life re-creation of the weirdnesses of COVID. He has also created a kind of dark fable from which depressing and distressing conclusions about humanity emerge. The bleakest of these observations becomes obvious by its conclusion. Campaigning for mayor, Cross drives around in a truck bearing a seemingly misspelled sign: “Your being manipulated.” Yet Eddington seems to be telling us not that Cross had misspelled anything, but that he was missing a comma, or perhaps a colon. “Your being: manipulated,” whether by the government, by technology (or its purveyors), or by some charismatic personality who feeds you slop over the internet—anyone other than yourself. Eddington is not supposed to be a horror movie. But it’s hard to think of anything more frightening than that.
