Eddington

Released 2025. Director: Ari Aster

REMEMBER THE PANDEMIC THAT CHANGED ALL OUR LIVES not so long ago? I'm sure you do, unless you were born after the event, in which case I'm amazed you're reading this. During that dark and long period while the world was grappling with containing a fast-spreading virus, we all had to change our behaviour for the greater good.

Eddington takes us back to the early days of the COVID-19 era, May 2020 to be precise. With governments issuing mask mandates, social distancing and limiting the number of people in public spaces, resistance and disagreements were to be expected. Conspiracy theories began to flourish even before vaccines were introduced and the anti-vaxxers jumped onboard.

Against this tinderbox backdrop, this is a story of two men on opposing sides of an unprecedented and volatile situation. Joe Cross is the sheriff of Eddington, a small desert town in New Mexico. He's not fond of the laws handed down by the state government and does not hesitate to bend or flout them. Mayor Ted Garcia is a firm believer that nobody—including the sheriff—is exempted from the new laws, unwelcome as they may be.

The two men have no common ground and often lock horns in public, each finding the other impossible to work with. This comes at a time when the mayor is running for re-election. The sheriff decides to throw his hat in the ring and launches his own campaign to wrestle power.

Adding tension to the struggle to keep the townsfolk at peace, young people are getting restless being couped up, spurred to action by the death of George Floyd and take to the streets with Black Lives Matter protests. At home, Joe's wife Louise (an under-developed role for Emma Stone) feels her mental state unraveling, heightened by her husband's sudden foray into politics.

Ari Aster stirs this brew of psychological unease with increasing intensity, adding new elements to build complications, one of which is the arrival of a social media agitator played by Austin Butler with menacing arrogance. Aster, who came to prominence with Hereditary and Midsommer, both guaranteed to scare your pulse rate into hyperdrive, eschews explicit horror in his fourth feature and instead focuses on masculine battle for supremacy. In all his movies, including Beau is Afraid (which also stars Joaquin Phoenix), dysfunction—inter-generational or intra-community—is the stuff for nightmares.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross as a family man, rustled by personal worries and rattled by the waves of discontent around him. The sheriff is a complicated character to categorise neatly. You see he has a good point to make, yet he's also anti-authority himself and far from a law-abiding citizen. Phoenix embodies some of the bewilderment and dissonance that many must have felt as our daily lives plunged rather suddenly into an unfamiliar groove at the start of the lockdown.

The mayor, on the other hand, is calm and assured, striding into a new territory with apparent ease. Pedro Pascal portrays a politician with insight and clarity. He appears to uphold the law more so than the town's chief enforcer and isn't troubled by a challenge to his position.

At the start, both these men are neither clear-cut hero or villain, which adds texture to a story about control. As the situation spirals, however, crisis brings out their darker aspects. Is Joe justified in allowing an old man to enter a shop without a face mask because he finds it hard to breathe? Is Ted harming the environment by facilitating big tech to build a massive data centre? Joe feels self-justified in ignoring orders from state authorities. Ted has no qualms humiliating the sheriff in public. Ted is accused of sexual assault of Joe's wife. Joe frames his deputy for his own heinous crime.

The conflagration of events comes to a head with a shocking murder (or two, or three). The lead-up to the climax is a drawn-out, expertly paced and nail-biting confrontation that unfolds over an eerily quiet desert town at night. What started out as a feud is now a scaled-up operation involving terrorists and snipers. Aster films the suspenseful action with panache, his camera moving steadily around a hunted man almost to induce jump scares.

Eddington makes an attempt to comment on various social issues before veering into paranoid thriller territory. The points, however, are tepid and sketchy. The movie has a few solid moments but in the end, feels like a mash of two halves from different movies. Apart from Joe Cross, most of the other characters feel lacking and slight, given insufficient time to develop. The penultimate act is terrific, but overall Eddington is uneven and the satiric end feels staged for effect, a miscalculated epilogue that muddles rather than clarifies.

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