We’re not so far away from the outbreak of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic that I don’t remember how it felt. The itchy, pain in the ass masks. The six foot social distancing. The closure of movie theaters, restaurants, essentially anything that took place inside.* The gnawing uncertainty, the feeling that the virus could be virtually anywhere and affect us in virtually any way. It was a feeling of uncertainty, that things were slowly spinning out of control, and that’s the first of two details that will stick with me forever.

The second detail is disappointment. In us, as a country, as a species. You’d think that when a global catastrophe happens, we’d instinctively put aside our differences. Do what we can to help and work together. Make an effort to extend grace to others. Not so much! We screamed at each other online, screamed at each other in public, and immersed ourselves into a fetid swamp of conspiratorial and immature thinking. It was embarrassing to see grown adults acting that way, and I say that as a grown adult.

We were gripped by a fever, and it never passed. It lingered on, lingers still, and it transformed our country into a shadowy and distorted reflection of itself. Ari Aster’s newest film Eddington shoves us back into May of 2020, when the spark became a flame. What does it mean? What does it say about us? According to the movie…who knows?

Like so many aspects of the pandemic, the film begins with masks. In the New Mexico town of Eddington, Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) responds to a call. A market refuses to let an old man in. Why? He says he can’t breathe in the mask. Joe understands where the old-timer is coming from, the masks are hard to breathe in. Besides, nobody in Eddington has gotten COVID. Joe orders the market to let the man in. How bad could it all be, really?

As it turns out, very bad! Eddington’s mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) is very much a fan of both masks and mask shaming. He’s not a fan of Joe’s, largely due to something that happened between Ted and Louise (Emma Stone), Joe’s wife. In 2020, Ted is up for re-election, and he figures it’ll be easy. He’s got a deal going with a tech company to build a data center on the outskirts of town, one with the amusing name of “solidgoldmagikarp.” Maybe it’ll eat up too much water during the perpetual drought season, but maybe it’ll add jobs.

That mask conflict leads Joe to a hasty decision. He’ll run for mayor on an anti-mask platform, and unseat Ted. We get the sense that Joe is not exactly a long-term planner, when he orders his deputies Guy (Luke Grimes) and Michael (Michael Ward) to help out with his campaign. We get the same sense when Joe blindsides Louise with his snap decision. Her mental health is in a fragile place, and she’s terrified that a mayoral campaign will crack her in two.

Things get worse, because this is 2020. Louise falls under the spell of Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), a charismatic cult leader. Louise’s mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) mutters darkly about online conspiracy theories. If the town weren’t enraged already, the death of George Floyd adds an extra layer of shrieking anger. And if that’s not enough, Antifa arrives to cause more than a little mischief. Can the center hold? Will the town come together? This is Eddington, so what do you think?

I suspect most people will hate Eddington. Not because it’s incompetently made, which it isn’t. It’s a movie that goes out of its way to make viewers uncomfortable, and that’s director Ari Aster’s thing. He specializes in aggressively unpleasant films. He’s good at it, and if you watch Hereditary, Midsommar, or Beau is Afraid, you’ll see a filmmaker who excels at creating surrealistic nightmares. He’s doing another variation on a theme here, and instead of a neurotic with mother issues or a cult annihilating a family, we’re watching a town go insane. Aster does excellent work striking a balance between escalating paranoia and trenchant social satire.  Most of the film rockets by as he gradually ratchets up the tension skillfully. He immerses us into the headspace of a Plandemic true believer, or of someone desperately using QAnon to assign meaning to chaos.

That’s the root problem, I think. Aster’s screenplay spends close to two hours spinning a web of bananas conspiracy theories, and it teases us with the idea that it’s all building to something. It turns out it isn’t, and the last half hour starts bonkers and ends with a “Nobody knows anything, so what are you gonna do?” shrug. From an artistic standpoint, I understand the temptation to want to sprint toward ambiguity, particularly when it applies to questions that may be unanswerable. Aster is attempting to make a coherent point about an incoherent time. It makes plenty of sense thematically, but from a narrative standpoint, that’s a real problem.** Successful narratives need a resolution. They can end on an ambiguous note successfully, much like Zodiac. That’s unfortunately not what happens here. So how do you resolve it? For the story Aster is telling, the most logical endpoints are either the reveal that the real conspiracy is crazier than previously believed, or that the characters have to reckon with the hard reality that none of the conspiracies exist. Instead, the ending is muddled and never builds to anything of consequence. 

The journey getting there, though? It’s solid, particularly Aster’s quietly ludicrous sense of humor. The best example is Joe’s squad car, the one covered in misspelled right-wing slogans. The other best example are the town’s young people, the ones protesting police brutality that hasn’t really happened yet. They’re committed to condemning their white privilege, but they just have a few things they want to say, first. Aster understands that most, if not all of the people in his film are deeply irritating. He goes after the left, right, and center with effective mockery. A gag near the end of the film is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time. 

As committed as Aster is to making his films as specific as possible, he’s just as committed to strong performances from his casts. Joaquin Phoenix’s Joe desperately wants to bring Eddington together and “save” it, whatever that means. The problem is, Joe isn’t terribly bright and has a bad habit of making snap decisions, then doubling down on them. He may be a dope, but he’s not always wrong. Pedro Pascal’s Ted is a well known kind of hypocrite, the one who wants to get together with friends at a bar during the lockdowns. When Joe catches him, Ted blithely declares that they’re discussing “essential business.” I always like Emma Stone, and while she doesn’t have too much to do as Louise, she turns in a strong performance of a woman who barely has the bandwidth to deal with her marriage, much less a global pandemic.

Most of Eddington is effective. Long stretches of it pull us back to those dangerously dumb days of May 2020, and remind us what it was like. I wonder if Ari Aster set himself up to fail, by asking what the pandemic meant. That’s the job of artists, to ask those kinds of questions, even if they are impossible to answer. If you see Eddington, which you probably won’t, I guarantee it’ll spark discussion. I promise you won’t enjoy it, but it’s a discussion that’s long overdue.

*As a former and current indoor kid, that was tough on me.

**Unless Aster is pulling a Lars Von Trier and is intentionally trying to piss off the audience.

Tim Brennan Movie Critic

Tim has been alarmingly enthusiastic about movies ever since childhood. He grew up in Boulder and, foolishly, left Colorado to study Communications in Washington State. Making matters worse, he moved to Connecticut after meeting his too-good-for-him wife. Drawn by the Rockies and a mild climate, he triumphantly returned and settled down back in Boulder County. He's written numerous screenplays, loves hiking, and embarrassed himself in front of Samuel L. Jackson. True story.