The virus wasn’t enemy enough.
That’s one of the many things Americans learned during the COVID-19 pandemic. And it’s a lesson that Eddington—only a few years on from the pandemic’s darkest moments—means to remind us. Faced with the most common of all enemies, we tore each other apart. If the movie feels “too soon” or something like an instant artifact, the sad truth is we’ve only become more ensnared by the distrust, disinformation, and downright hatred that flared during the early quarantine months in particular.
That’s the setting for Eddington: small-town New Mexico, the spring of 2020. Written and directed by Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau is Afraid), the film means to be a microcosm that stands in for a macrocosm. It’s by no means assured enough to accomplish such lofty ambitions, yet in its communal depiction of the brain rot that spread from sea to shining sea, it’s at least a curdled curiosity.
Joaquin Phoenix—previously Aster’s Beau—stars as Sheriff Joe Cross, a skeptic of the virus in general and of masking in particular. This puts him at odds with Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who staunchly supports mandates requiring masks, limiting customers in grocery stores, and establishing six feet of separation in public. An early standoff involves the local grocery store, where employees forcibly restrain an elderly, unmasked man from entering; he claims he can’t breathe with the fabric over his face. Sheriff Cross orders them to let the man in, refuses to wear a mask of his own, and then runs into Mayor Garcia while shopping. It’s a showdown of claims and counterclaims, facts and rumors, pandering and posturing.
Eddington gradually expands beyond this two-man feud, exploring how the pandemic plays out for a whole host of characters in the community: Cross’ stricken wife (Emma Stone) and conspiracy-obsessed mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell); Garcia’s sniveling teen son (Matt Gomez Hidaka) and his friend (Cameron Mann), the latter of whom throws himself into Black Lives Matter protests largely to flirt with a justice warrior (Amelie Hoeferle); Cross’ deputies, one white (Luke Grimes) and the other Black (Micheal Ward); and a Native-American police officer (William Belleau) from the neighboring Pueblo jurisdiction. With human contact restricted, many of these characters turn to places like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where they’re fed conflicts and conspiracies, which eventually manifest on Eddington’s streets as the movie becomes increasingly unhinged.
At its best, this broad canvas adds up to something like Robert Altman’s Nashville, another cinematic consideration of America at a critical juncture. But Aster lacks the shaggy, free-flowing touch that Altman employed to truly make you feel like a fly on the wall. In Aster’s films, the fly is an ominous part of the production design. Eddington never approaches the outright horror of Hereditary and Midsommar, nor the interior, blackly comic insanity of Beau Is Afraid, but he and cinematographer Darius Khondji do manage sinister imagery throughout. (Keep an eye out for the creepy dolls that Louise, Cross’ wife, makes and sells online.)
Politically, I found Eddington to be liberally muddy. (Perhaps you could say the same of Nashville?) As things escalate, Sheriff Cross clearly becomes the villain, but Aster includes early moments meant to humanize him: at the grocery store, he buys food for the older man who has been banned; he tenderly attempts to connect with his distant wife and even anonymously buys her dolls; he tosses a water bottle to an itinerant man in rags shuffling down the street. Meanwhile, Pascal’s Garcia is smugly self-righteous, seemingly delighting in all the new rules, while at the same time pushing through a data-center project that will hasten the area’s drought. If the pandemic turned questionable guys bad, the movie seems to suggest, it made the bad guys worse.
Throughout human history, there has been something in our broken nature that resists community and seeks conflict. Eddington captures this, particularly the way it was fomented by the historical circumstances of 2020 America. What’s the ultimate value in such an endeavor? I can’t exactly say after a first viewing, especially this close to actually living through much of what the movie depicts. But I do know that (spoilers ahead) there is something about the climactic chase—in which Sheriff Cross is pursued by anti-fascist assassins, crashes through the roof of the town’s history museum, and breaks a display case holding the bones of Geronimo—that feels chaotically, boldly apropos for our current moment and American history as a whole.
(7/23/2025)
