“Your Being Manipulated!” a partisan bumper sticker reads in Eddington. The hapless misuse of a possessive adjective suggests that the candidate being advertised in red, white, and blue—one Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), a political neophyte with designs on the mayorship of Eddington, New Mexico, circa summer 2020—isn’t necessarily the smartest guy in the room, or maybe that his ad hoc staffers aren’t seasoned political operators. Not that it really matters: Joe’s the town sheriff, not the grammar police. And besides, the spelling error might appeal to those who’d prefer not to be corrected in the first place.
The phrase also serves as a mission statement for Ari Aster’s filmmaking. Manipulation—and, while we’re at it, possession—are his pet themes. The 39-year-old writer-director—who’s been hailed as a visionary by no less than Martin Scorsese—specializes in conspiracies and confidence games, in secret societies hiding in plain sight. His preferred protagonists are sleepwalkers, while his go-to climax is a (very) rude awakening. This format was stretched toward a breaking point in 2023’s Beau is Afraid, an epic, distended orgy of beta-male neurosis whose neutered namesake, also played by Phoenix, winds up on trial for his passivity; he becomes a poster boy for manipulation.
That film’s predictable commercial underperformance notwithstanding, Aster has had carte blanche to parlay his paranoid style with impunity: with each successive project, he’s refined his formal control while doubling down on his commitment to visceral—and, for a significant subset of skeptics, gratuitously vicious—money shots (i.e. the wizened, cliff-diving Swedes of Midsommar, whose bumpy landings split the difference between Jackson Pollock and Wile E. Coyote). That Aster has a thing for cults is obvious; the question is whether he’s more interested in the clash between tradition and modernity or the opportunity for ostentatious showmanship—theirs or Aster’s own, as if there’s any difference—that his antiheroes and villains afford.
There are no literally demonic forces in Eddington, but Aster’s fourth feature, which arrives in theaters after a polarizing, borderline hostile reception at the Cannes Film Festival, could have easily swapped titles with his debut, Hereditary. During nightly patrols, Joe cruises YouTube on his phone, seeking out tutorials on how a decent, considerate guy like himself might successfully cajole a reluctant partner into having a baby. His wife, Louise (Emma Stone), isn’t exactly champing at the bit to be a mom. She won’t let Joe touch her after bedtime, and there are hints in the couple’s conversations and body language that their marriage, by now several years old, may never have been consummated, period. (“I’m getting better,” she whispers unconvincingly after once again rebuffing her husband.) It’s in this context of domestic frustration—and impotence—that Joe hatches his plan to deepen his duties as a public servant and take on Eddington’s airbrushed mayoral incumbent, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal)—a smooth operator with deep-pocketed backers and a tendency toward smarmy, self-serving virtue signalling. There’s a feeling in the air that Ted has used COVID to strengthen his control over Eddington’s electorate, and Joe, who’s asthmatic, seethes about having to work behind a mask. What’s really driving him, though, is a fear over his legacy, or a lack thereof. If anything, he seems to resent Ted as much for being a devoted dad as for being a stickler for the rules.
As it turns out, there are other, even more personal reasons for Joe to hate Ted, and vice versa, and the mystery of their mutual antipathy—and how it intersects with the bad vibes between Louise and her rabbit-holed mother, as well as (natch) an adjacent commune of cultists headed by a bedroom-eyed smooth talker played by Austin Butler—pressurizes Eddington’s early sections with layers of intrigue. Coming after the stridently isolated narratives of Hereditary and Midsommar (where the real world may as well not exist) and the cartoon stylization of Beau is Afraid (which begins in a nightmare version of New York City and burrows inward into a set of interior landscapes), Eddington’s stab at multi-directional social portraiture feels like a new wrinkle in Aster’s cinema. Ditto the overtly topical thrust of the screenplay, with its brisk, bristling inventory of Trump-era talking points: not only mask mandates and lockdowns, but hashtag activism, social media doxxing campaigns, Pizzagate-ish accusations of pedophilia, and compulsive after-hours doomscrolling. Beyond the best way to tackle COVID, the wedge issue separating Joe and Ted’s constituencies is the proposed construction of a new and massive data center—an ominous symbol of a future that’s rushing up to meet a town struggling with the transition from past to present.
If there’s a common denominator between several of the most trenchant movies of 2025 so far—David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds; Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud; the underrated Megan 2.0—it’s their treatment of AI as not just a plot point but a potentially existential threat. Eddington throws its (cowboy) hat in the ring. “We’re in a race,” said Aster in a recent interview with Letterboxd. “Whatever space there was between our lived reality and this imaginal reality—that’s disappearing, and we’re merging, and that’s very frightening.”
Technophobia certainly brings out the best in his filmmaking: working in tandem with the gifted cinematographer Darius Khondji, he strategically compartmentalizes the widescreen frame to depict a world subdivided asymetrically into echo chambers. Screens are everywhere in Eddington, not only streaming updates and surfing algorithms, but catching and distorting reflections in ways that create Cronenberg-like hybrids of physical and digital presence. Joe uses his iPhone both as a de facto body-cam and a mobile campaign headquarters; his dashboard laptop, meanwhile, defaults to a photo of Louise, who watches him quietly on his rounds like a ghost. Such virtuoso formalism would be distracting or enervating if it didn’t connect directly to Aster’s core concern of an all-devouring solipsism, a condition rendered palpable (and funny) by Eddington’s geographical remove from the world at large. “There’s no COVID here,” stammers Joe, trying to defuse a standoff at a grocery store, and given the city’s head count of 2,500 or so civilians, his denial has the modest ring of truth. At the same time, though, Joe’s stance is a form of posturing—a shorthand for a don’t-tread-on-me mindset. One line, repeated at different times by various parties, distills both forms of virality—biological infection and clout-chasing—into a mantra: “Take your mask off.”
There is a degree to which Eddington is a dress-up party with a Western theme. Enlisted by GQ to divulge his influences, Aster cited John Ford’s 1946 classic, My Darling Clementine (with a magisterial Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp), and Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Oscar winner, Unforgiven. The dichotomy between those two movies—one a lyrical treatise about solidarity and honor, the other a stark revision of the idea of the noble gunslinger—testifies to his ambition, although the movie that came to mind for me was John Sayles’s superb 1996 thriller, Lone Star, also about a small-town sheriff caught between constituencies. The difference is that where Sayles tackles social issues earnestly from a solid left-liberal perspective, Aster—whether as a matter of temperament or out of fidelity to a cultural epoch defined in equal measures by accelerationism and horseshoe theory—cultivates what seems, at a glance, like nihilistic chaos. As Joe’s campaign ramps up, his law-and-order persona turns toxic, poisoned by 24-hour cable footage of the George Floyd riots. Cue a series of copycat protests organized by the town’s (all-white) chapter of Black Lives Matter, whose members are mortified that Joe’s deputy (Micheal Ward), one of Eddington’s few African American residents, refuses to switch allegiances. It turns out that pretty much everybody in Eddington is a culture warrior, and the rules of engagement keep changing. The angrier people get, the closer the acts of character assasination edge toward the real thing.
At Cannes, the prevailing criticism of Eddington was that it refused to pick a lane: that its tone was tantamount to a gloating both-sidesism that located its ugly-American microcosm just down road from South Park. These charges are serious, but I don’t think they totally stick. One byproduct of Aster’s sensibility is that it makes it appear that he simply hates his characters—that he’s an arsonist taking a torch to his own straw men—and there is a theatre-of-cruelty aspect to certain passages, particularly during the balls-out, mask-off second half, which unleashes hellacious violence. But I’d say that overall, what he’s attempting in Eddington is trickier than mere misanthropy or zeitgeist-surfing. If Aster is an edgelord, he’s an anxious one; there’s no sense that he’s congratulating himself for pushing his audience’s buttons, or condescending to his chosen milieu.
The backstory that he actually grew up in New Mexico—and wrote a draft of Eddington before the breakout of Hereditary—belies traces of cynical, point-scoring opportunism. If one allows for the kind of visual and tonal inflation endemic to this sort of genre pastiche—the broad but purposeful cartooning of the Coen brothers, whose No Country for Old Men looms large—Eddington feels personal, and its observations about the way local pride can metastasize into fraudulent populism and reactionary bullying have the ring of truth. Frankly, Aster seems more interested in New Mexico than the Coens are in Texas. Maybe it’s the presence of Stone—who fills out her small but crucial role with an eerie quietude that evokes Sissy Spacek as Carrie White—but as a sociological commentary, Eddington slots in next to The Curse, with which it shares not only a setting, but also a conceptual throughline about America as contested territory: history as one big haunted burial ground. The mandate of the Western is to map the hinge points between myth and history, and Aster knows this well. To bastardize the message of another John Ford film, Eddington examines the impulse to shitpost the legend.
There is, perhaps, something nasty about the way Aster savages hashtag activism and curated timelines in Eddington; a generous assessment would place the ratio of cheap shots to well-aimed bullseyes at about 50/50 (sample sight gag: a white girl doing TikTok choreography about James Baldwin). The prevailing subtext that such performative ideological purity works at least partially as cover for slipperier coming-of-age sensations—online organizing as an adolescent aphrodisiac—skirts glibness. But Aster seems genuinely fascinated with the process of inheritance: the matter of what we take from our parents, whether they’re necessarily trying to pass it on or not. Ultimately, Eddington is not as much a cautionary tale about American psychosis as an immersion in it, and, as such, it gradually takes on the form of a stress dream, gaining in resonance the further it plunges into a fugue state.
That wobbly, twilight-zone quality of reality folding in on itself is probably Aster’s sweet spot as a filmmaker. He’s good at spiralling, and any viewer who hasn’t already dug in their heels against him is liable to be sucked into the vortex along with Joe, whose descent is expertly modulated by Phoenix, with his uncanny ability to hollow out emotions in real time. This is a quieter and more impressive performance than the one in Beau is Afraid, and a more controlled portrait of radicalization than Joker as well; it’s the first time in a while I haven’t taken Phoenix’s abilities to carry a tonally complex movie for granted. The sheer relentlessness of Eddington’s final passages might strike some as a form of directorial overcompensation, with Aster pulling out all kinds of heavy artillery in order to justify his own elevated-auteur status; the same goes for the 145-minute run time, which leaves some narrative elements belabored and others underdeveloped. The latter is fascinating: the cinematic equivalent of a false flag operation, with some daring sleight-of-hand buried in the ear-splitting sound mix.
There is a significant, semi-concealed twist in the final act of Eddington that comes closer than anything before it to overt provocation; it more or less begs those who aren’t paying attention—or who have knives out for Aster—to read the film the wrong way. It’s one thing to suspect during Eddington that you(‘)r(e) being manipulated: because you are. But it’s another to work through the troubling nature of Aster’s game, which plays rough but also fair, concluding—with a mix of resignation and rueful humor that gets things in the vicinity of existential tragedy—that the house always wins.
Adam Nayman
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book ‘The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together’ is available now from Abrams.Source link
