I love the first two films from writer/director Ari Aster. Hereditary and Midsommar cemented his place within the horror genre, and earned him a bunch of fans, hotly anticipating whatever he would do next. Then, his third feature complicated things. 2023’s Beau is Afraid played more like a dark comedy with horror/suspense elements and heightened surrealism. That film didn’t work for me, but I could still appreciate the ingenuity in Aster’s vision. I was still pretty excited to see whatever he did next. His most recent film, Eddington, premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, to mixed reviews. I was still excited to see it because Aster making an alleged satirical thriller about the COVID-19 pandemic was a sales pitch I wanted to hear more about. If Ari Aster started to lose me with Beau is Afraid, he’s completely lost me now.

In May 2020 in the fictional small town of Eddington, New Mexico, the bigoted town sheriff Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) refuses to wear a mask and gets angry with everyone simply trying to stay alive. He has a longstanding feud with the town’s mayor Ted (Pedro Pascal) who is trying to keep the town safe. Ted also has a history with Joe’s wife Louise (Emma Stone), and Louise’s conspiracy theorist mother (Deirdre O’Connell) was staying with them before the pandemic hit, and hasn’t left. Once the tensions between Joe and Ted reach a boiling point, Joe decides to run for mayor of Eddington, opposing Ted. Chaos and violence ensues.

I think it’s very important that we revisit the days of the early pandemic in media, considering how this time is already being buried by history. This year was the five-year anniversary of the lockdown, and if you’re old enough to remember the five year anniversary of 9/11, you’ll remember the news coverage about this – it was all you would see for the entire month of September 2006. In March 2025, when we hit the five-year anniversary of the lockdown, I barely saw any media coverage about this. And it’s because half of our country is still deluded enough to believe the pandemic was a hoax or didn’t really happen. For that reason, I think it’s important we tell stories like this. And yet, Eddington is kind of a terrible movie and there are a few central reasons why.

The first reason – this film runs two and a half hours and I’m not entirely sure what it’s trying to say. Ari Aster is great in the horror genre, but he’s neither a sociologist nor a satirist. Eddington’s message could be boiled down to ‘everybody is stupid and wrong’ and I feel like in our current political/social climate, that kind of message is dangerous. One, because that allows the worst people in the audience to make the movie about whatever they want it to be, and two, it is baffling how little this country has learned in the five years since the COVID-19 pandemic. We are falling into the habits and traps that resulted in the 2020 lockdown yet again, and it’s horrifying to witness. The satire of this time in history is so muddled and so contrived, Eddington fails to exhibit a strong point of view on its own. It’s mostly people yelling at each other for two and a half hours, and if, like me, you get enough of that in your everyday doomscrolling, it’s not the kind of thing you want when you go to the cinema.

Another reason Eddington is terrible is because it steadfastly wastes just about every actor in it. Aside from Joaquin Phoenix, as our ‘complicated protagonist’, nobody has anything worthwhile to do here. I personally found a character who screams about masks and COVID protocol, puts a sign on his police van that says ‘Your Being Brainwashed’, and might as well be wearing a MAGA hat, to not be a very compelling lead to follow for two and a half hours. He gets more depth and attention to detail than anyone else here, and yet this person is impossible to root for. He keeps making the wrong decisions and keeps making the situation worse for himself, and the film doesn’t give you a reason to sympathize with him, and doesn’t bother to even give him an ending that feels satisfying. For a film that aggressively pulls its punches to exhausting effect throughout, it ends on the biggest shoulder shrug I could have possibly imagined. I guess Phoenix’s performance here is competent, but honestly, after this, I would be fine not seeing him in a movie again for awhile.

Among the wasted talent here, we find the ultra-popular Pedro Pascal, who isn’t in as much of the movie as I expected. Watching these two characters essentially have a political debate is never fun, never entertaining and never insightful. We also have Emma Stone, as Phoenix’s put-upon wife who gets herself wrapped up in a cult. She has nothing to do, she shows up in maybe a handful of scenes, and it’s kind of insulting that at this point in her career she still has to take roles like this. There’s also Austin Butler, who plays the leader of the aforementioned cult, and he has even less to do than Stone. He shows up in maybe two or three scenes, but to his credit, he’s committing to this like it isn’t a thankless role. Deirdre O’Connell plays Stone’s whacked out mother, and if you’re keeping track, the only female characters in this film are depicted as insane people. I guess everyone here is nutty to some extent (with the possible exception of Pascal’s character), but after Aster’s handling of female characters in Beau is Afraid, I’m starting to think Ari Aster just doesn’t like women.

From a technical perspective, this is a well-made film. Cinematographer Darius Khondji, who has worked with people like Bong Joon-Ho and Wong Kar-Wai, shot this and it’s clear the objective here was to make this feel like a modern Western. Khondji achieves this look and this overall vibe, but at what cost? Daniel Pemberton and Bobby Krlic compose the score, and I can’t recall a single point it felt particularly memorable to me. Lucian Johnston, editor of Beau is Afraid, returns here, and both movies could have done with a trim. The pacing here is slow and repetitive, as Aster’s script bangs the audience over the head repeatedly with the same two or three surface-level points.

Overall, I’m not sure how fans of Ari Aster’s previous work will react to Eddington. It’s not a horror movie, not in the traditional sense. The horror of this comes from the idea of reliving the early days of the pandemic, and who wants that experience right now? I’m just not sure Ari Aster is the filmmaker I want talking about social and racial tension, the George Floyd protests, genuine vs. performative activism, or any of the other million hot-button topics this movie fails to wrap its head around. The satire here is so obvious, so surface-level and so repetitive. Eddington is not saying anything substantive about our shared experience of the 2020 lockdown, or where we’ve ended up since. It’s a story that could have hit hard emotionally or even on a visceral human level. Instead it just aggressively hits the same beats over and over again, leaving the viewer exhausted by the time the house lights come up, wondering what the point of all this was. Eddington is a wildly disorganized, endless, self-important slog. It’s incredibly heavy handed and smug, and more than a little infuriating. There are a million half-baked subplots that go nowhere, and no one and nothing to connect to emotionally. It’s one of the year’s biggest disappointments to date.