Film
Ari Aster’s pandemic film, Eddington, might be the first Hollywood movie to successfully channel the malignant forces that broke humanity’s brain. By Luke Goodsell.
Lacerating visions and doomy vibes: Eddington recasts Covid’s shadow
Five years on, the Covid pandemic – with its spooky masks, haunted lockdowns and horrifying celebrity singalongs – has almost begun to feel like a collective hallucination, a nightmare long since consigned to cultural amnesia.
Maybe it’s because Covid-19 so fundamentally reshaped life as we knew it that the movies – an art form irrevocably altered by the pandemic – have thus far been unable to come to terms with it or, at the very least, had little interest in doing so. As our pre-eminent philosopher Liam Gallagher once put it, thinking he’d contracted the coronavirus when his house was merely overheated, it was a “very confusing and scary” time.
Certainly few would have suspected that Ari Aster, the American writer-director behind horror hits Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019) and the navel-gazing dirge Beau Is Afraid (2023), might be the filmmaker to make Hollywood’s great Covid movie. But the A24 provocateur’s new movie Eddington, a satirical black comedy that unfolds at the dawn of the pandemic, might be the first film to channel the malignant forces that broke humanity’s brain. It’s a movie that functions less as period piece than demonic incantation, locating the nexus of the moment in which we presently find ourselves.
The film opens with one of those images that lets you know you’re in for a cracking good-bad time: an extreme close-up on the gnarled toenails of a vagrant lurching down the great American highway, raving through his saliva-encrusted beard as he looms over the eponymous fictional south-west. Moments later, the city limit sign is spectrally illuminated, in an unmistakable homage to the opening of David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., by the headlights of a passing patrol car.
It’s late May 2020 and the pandemic has rendered Eddington an eerie ghost town. Local sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), no fan of the mask mandate, has announced he’s running for mayor against the incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), an ostensibly model bureaucrat who’s holding illegal maskless hangouts and is in secret cahoots with big-money developers.
“YOUR BEING MANIPULATED” bleats the spellcheck-agnostic slogan on the side of Cross’s police car-turned-political campaign truck, invoking the faux-homespun populism deployed by so many anti-vaxxers and Trumpian yahoos to prey on the fears of middle America. His wife, Louise (Emma Stone), is holed up at home collecting tchotchkes and preaching damnation with her conspiracy theorist mother, an Orphean version of her “ethical” real estate scammer in Nathan Fielder’s The Curse, which is also set in a south-west town bordering a Native American territory.
With Eddington, Aster takes us back to the foundational American myth of the Western, where lawlessness reigned and people taking matters into their own hands was de rigueur – at least in Hollywood, which helped to burnish this national sense of self. It’s an analogy so simple it’s brilliant. At one point, Cross and Garcia square off in the empty street like gunfighters, the classic 20 paces of a duel reconfigured as Covid physical distance, Phoenix with his 10-gallon hat and Pascal in a fleece vest that could be one of Clint Eastwood’s ponchos.
Adding powder to the keg is a mysterious cult leader (Austin Butler) who has escaped a human trafficking gauntlet and become involved in a sinister plot to transform Eddington, setting it ablaze. Following the police murder of unarmed Black man George Floyd in Minneapolis, a wave of Black Lives Matter protesters sweep into town.
Eddington captures the global derangement of high Covid, its madness jazzed by Aster’s lacerating visions and doomy vibes: panopticon drones hovering over town like UFOs; an Antifa private jet emerging in striking silhouette against the sun; the words “no peace” crackling in sulphurous flames. He’s also reliably funny, after an off-kilter fashion: there’s a great comic scene in which Phoenix, whose hapless lawman becomes the movie’s Daffy Duck, falls through a ceiling and crashes into a Native American history museum like Godzilla stomping a miniature Tokyo, and a violent climax that adopts the formalism of first-person shooter video games to unsettlingly hilarious effect.
Just what has this prankster – that erstwhile most self-absorbed of white American male filmmakers – got himself into, other than a whole lot of “the left and the right, they’re just as bad as each other” and we’re all going to hell in a hand-sanitiser basket?
The film’s satirical marks – performative white youth leading the BLM protest, for starters – are deserving but a little easy, especially when its lone major Black character is a cop (Micheal Ward) who appears to exist purely to reinforce Aster’s point.
Still, for all its narrative fireworks and equal-opportunity assault on humanity, Eddington captures something elusive – not just an overwhelming national sadness but a sense of how life on Earth is being transformed by phenomena beyond comprehension. Aster catches the inexorable rise of technology, an artificial life form that knows only forward momentum and is indifferent to human morality, where unwitting Gen Z males are the foot soldiers of a faceless apocalypse. It can’t help but recall Lynch and his era-defining Twin Peaks: The Return, the 2017 series that anticipated the psychic darkness soon to be sweeping the planet.
Just as the film seems to be headed for a predictable destination, sympathising with its bumbling antihero and his calamitously bad decisions, it wriggles into a dimension far darker and more enigmatic, derailed by an exhilarating occultic tow that even Aster appears not to have anticipated. It’s the sort of evil the filmmaker’s actual horror films, Hereditary and Midsommar, were too studied to properly summon, with a cosmic anti-punchline that his abysmal Beau Is Afraid failed to land – even if Aster can’t help but throw in a mother-in-law gag that nearly feels contractually obliged.
In Eddington, as in the present moment, the future belongs to those without a moral compass. It’s a world in which humanity’s old stories and binary politics no longer hold any meaning, where the yellowed playbooks of capitalism and Marxism are as redundant as $1000 bills and rich-kid working-class cosplay.
The film is both a requiem for a mythologised America that never existed and a call for new modes of thinking and storytelling that might meet the new world on its own terms. Or, just maybe, it’s a plea for everyone to just chill the fuck out a little, to sit back and accept the chaos of the universe.
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This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 20, 2025 as "Requiem for a dream".
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