Advertised as a Covid pandemic-era movie, Eddington has less to do with 2020 than 2025. The film makes this explicit with its epilogue, justifying otherwise hyperbolic claims from critics, like the pull-quote in the trailer calling Ari Aster’s new film “the first truly modern Western.” This emphasis in the praise on the present was baffling to me for the first 90 minutes of Eddington, as the film presents the events of five years ago in a way so passé and filtered through a lens that either condenses ideas and the events of that spring and summer to the point of untruthfulness or it just misremembers what it was like entirely.
This can be excused to an extent by the fact that Eddington, despite its ostensibly historic setting, isn’t a real place. Aster turns the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico (itself already a place of unreality, having renamed itself after a radio show in 1950) into an island in the desert to observe modern American psychosis. With his usual misanthropy, Aster stages a bad-faith political debate between the impotent MAGA-coded sheriff and the smarmy liberal mayor—the two using mask mandates and BLM to try to assert personal dominance over each other and affirm their own world views. It’s trite, a mostly boring exercise that spins its wheels for an hour-and-half looking for a chuckle out of things litigated to death five years ago. There are a couple of highlights, like Austin Butler’s short appearance as a Q-Anon adjacent cult leader or a sequence set to Katy Perry’s “Firework;” this makes so much of the film even more disappointing because it proves that Aster can make an interesting scene, he just often chooses not to.
The rug-pull that happens 3/5ths of the way through turns Eddington from a waffling, hackneyed Covid movie and into an exercise in genre. It’s typical of Aster, who likes to save his real intentions for his substantial final devolutions. When adapting the shock of Psycho, however, people like Aster sometimes forget that there had to be an interesting story that Marion Crane was involved in in the first place. Instead, the bulk of Eddington is a joke, one at the expense of an audience that got sold some kind of Covid satire.
Years ago a friend described Aster as making “troll cinema.” It’s a label I’ve thought about often in relation to the structure of his work, which has a smugness in its twists that gives the impression that Aster doesn’t think very highly of his audiences’ intelligence. In Eddington specifically, Aster yo-yo’s between the opposing forces arguing endlessly about the issues of 2020 only to show it was all to get audiences’ attention towards something that might not have sold as well on social media.
In his characters, Aster’s underlying dislike of humanity manifests itself as distrust, idiocy, and quiet nastiness. There’s some truth underneath it, but it’s hard to watch both because it feels so one-note, and that obfuscates what else was going on that summer. This as a read on 2020 can only come from someone who searched in that year for isolation, because what I saw through the lockdowns was people longing to reconnect, extraordinary racial solidarity in the streets, and a new wave labor organizing that came as a result.
The American psyche fractured through the callosotomy of 2020, but it perhaps had never been that attached to begin with. Moreover, the contemporary split in American politics comes from the veil of unity projected by the Obama years, ripped apart by the right-wing racism that had been fomenting since then, leading to the psychosis of the Right’s veneration of Donald Trump. Underlying this was another split from the American Left, represented in part by the Sanders campaign in 2016, that projected an alternative strain of thought breaking out from under the parallel liberal psychosis of the Democratic Party, which advocated for rights against the Right’s oppression while at the same time buying into the same overarching bureaucratic and technocratic rhizome that guides U.S. policy.
Call it the military industrial complex or the deep state—broadly, there’s a web of systems built to consolidate control towards the wealthy capitalist class and expand their power. It crosses party lines, especially since Citizens United opened the floodgates for unlimited campaign donations, forever turning American elections into proxy wars for the ultra-wealthy rather than anything ideological. It’s no wonder how, in Eddington, the advisor to the liberal mayor pushing for the big data center development is equally as excited in his new MAGA puppet in the film’s epilogue.
At one time, Aster thought Eddington would be his debut feature. Career-wise it’s probably for the best that in 2018 he released Hereditary with A24 instead, perfectly in time to capitalize on the apogee of the “elevated horror” trend. However, it’s interesting to think about how an early version of the film with the same core intact could’ve fit into 2018 as much as it did 2025—it’s not like anything has changed between Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden and back to Trump with regards to the handing of power between ostensibly bickering parties has led to similar results in the degradation of individual liberty and exacerbation of class divide at the hands of big tech and American security apparatuses.
Eddington ultimately, and surprisingly for such an otherwise politically uninteresting filmmaker, gets to the same point as an Adam Curtis documentary (and not exactly in any more efficient use of time), wherein the biggest villains are revealed to be not just the politicians but people like Sam Altman, Alex Karp, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk—the ones who’ll steal every resource from humanity to build the machines in which they can enslave it, so long as it means the safety of wealth for themselves. Its final reveal that the film isn’t set in the past but in a lead-up to the present, too, saves Eddington from Aster’s usually obnoxious empty signifiers built from amalgamations of ideas (occult imagery, Nordic mythos and religion) which serve mostly as decoration rather than something with textual heft (in stark contrast to his A24 contemporary, Robert Eggers, who has the opposite problem on focusing on the texture of his historicity to the point of forgetting to thematically interrogate his own works).
The anachronisms and composites of Eddington become excusable by his knotting of the thread—making a film not for 2025 audiences to look back at 2020, but to look at where they’re sitting currently. It’s a trick that might not have much staying power, and doesn’t make the film worthy of extraordinary examination, but in a time when filmgoers have less attention span and appear to want media that will simply affirm their beliefs against another, maybe a prolonged piece of sleight of hand is the only way to get that kind of message across.