Joaquin Phoenix in  Eddington.  Photo:  The New York Times.

Dear Commons Community,

Last night, my wife, Elaine and I, saw the movie Eddington, directed by Ari Aster and starring Joaquin Phoenix. Here is an excerpt from a New York Times review.

“The first and maybe only true jump scare in Ari Aster’s “Eddington” comes right at the start. A barefoot old man trudges down the center of a road running through an empty Western town. He’s ranting and incoherently raving as he climbs a craggy hill silhouetted against a twilight sky. He gazes, or maybe glares, out at the town below.

And then, the jolt, via text onscreen: LATE MAY, 2020.

Buckle up and hang on. Now we know why the streets are empty, and the man’s ravings take on some new dimension: Maybe he’s just regular unhinged, or maybe he’s been driven into lunacy by the last eight or so weeks of madness. Or maybe he’s the only sane one left. Who can tell? By late May 2020, even the most unflappable among us felt one raisin short of a fruitcake.

We were living with an invisible and potentially extinction-level threat, people were dying and the sirens were unrelenting. But we were also surrounded by screens from which blared real facts, half-facts, fact-shaped nonsense and full-on gobbledygook. It all felt more real than reality itself, which in turn felt like something we had once seen in a movie.

That feeling of unreal reality is what “Eddington” sets out to capture, and that is Aster’s specialty.”

It is a indeed a jolt of movie and no hostages are taken. If you like unpredictability in a film, Eddington is for you.  Below is a full review.

Tony

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The New York Times

Eddington Review: Once Upon a Time in the Pandemic

Ari Aster returns with a dystopian western farce about a world gone mad that you definitely remember.

By Alissa Wilkinson

Published July 17, 2025. Updated July 25, 2025

Eddington

NYT Critic’s Pick

Directed by Ari Aster

The first and maybe only true jump scare in Ari Aster’s “Eddington” comes right at the start. A barefoot old man trudges down the center of a road running through an empty Western town. He’s ranting and incoherently raving as he climbs a craggy hill silhouetted against a twilight sky. He gazes, or maybe glares, out at the town below.

And then, the jolt, via text onscreen: LATE MAY, 2020.

Buckle up and hang on. Now we know why the streets are empty, and the man’s ravings take on some new dimension: Maybe he’s just regular unhinged, or maybe he’s been driven into lunacy by the last eight or so weeks of madness. Or maybe he’s the only sane one left. Who can tell? By late May 2020, even the most unflappable among us felt one raisin short of a fruitcake.

We were living with an invisible and potentially extinction-level threat, people were dying and the sirens were unrelenting. But we were also surrounded by screens from which blared real facts, half-facts, fact-shaped nonsense and full-on gobbledygook. It all felt more real than reality itself, which in turn felt like something we had once seen in a movie.

That feeling of unreal reality is what “Eddington” sets out to capture, and that is Aster’s specialty. He was introduced to us as a horror director with 2018’s “Hereditary” (family and demonic horror) and 2019’s “Midsommar” (relationship and folk horror), but in 2023 he swerved into obviously personal territory with “Beau Is Afraid” — basically therapy journals dumped out on a table and come to hilarious, psychotically anxious life.

I love all of these movies, clearly designed to be feel-bad flicks and also provide twisted catharsis. It is hard to have a medium-size reaction to an Aster joint, and perhaps never more than with “Eddington.” This one is a western, centering on Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), the beleaguered asthmatic sheriff of the titular New Mexico town. He lives with his depressed wife, Louise (Emma Stone), who makes weird little dolls and sells them on the internet, and her mother, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), who moved in with them when the pandemic started and has gotten really into YouTube conspiracy theorists. (“Coronavirus, they used that word in 2019!” she tells her daughter and son-in-law over breakfast, by way of convincing them that this is all some kind of … well, who knows.)

Joe harbors a simmering resentment toward Eddington’s incumbent mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is not a bad guy particularly but just sort of annoying: tall, good looking, well off, performatively liberal and, crucially, a former boyfriend of Louise’s, from 20 years ago. Joe is also annoyed about the countywide mask mandate, given there haven’t been any Covid cases in Eddington, and more annoyed about the way people keep yelling at him to put on his mask when he’s in his truck.

Joe is frustrated by how the town feels empty, with storefronts signs that say things like “CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE BY DR. FAUCI” in the windows next to others that say “STRONGER TOGETHER.” He is worried about Louise, who spends all day cooped up with Dawn; they seem to be slipping under the spell of a kind of wellness influencer, or maybe cult leader, named Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler). Everything is getting under Joe’s skin.

One day he cracks and records a Facebook video announcing that he’ll be running against Ted for mayor. At the same time, the unrest prompted by the murder of George Floyd has reached the socially conscious teens of Eddington, and their activism collides with other folks in town. It seems like everyone is certain that “they” — the bad guys they see on their news network or social media platform of choice — are headed for them here in Eddington, aiming to destroy their preferred way of life. OK. So what if they are?

The plot of this movie is weirdly hard to describe, probably because describing the summer of 2020 makes you feel completely bananas. I’ve left out a lot of what’s stuffed into the movie, including a proposed data center to be built by a corporation called “solidgoldmagikarp,” a name apparently referring to one of three things: a Pokemon semi-meme, an obscure Reddit handle, or a word that seems to send ChatGPT into an erratic, hallucinatory state — no, I’m not joking.

That’s a good little key to this whole movie, which is loaded up with Easter eggs for things nobody feels nostalgic about. Do any of those references mean anything? No, not really: Instead, “Eddington” sets us not-so-gently adrift on a sea of very recent memories and the nausea they re-prompt, and waves merrily from the shore as we turn green.

That’s not to say it’s a drag. Not in the least. Your mileage will vary according to your stomach for this stuff, but I found myself breathless with giggles at times, sometimes the therapeutic laugh of recognition and sometimes because Aster has a keen eye for what’s most absurd about human nature. By the third act, things veer toward violent slapstick, crossing particularly berserk western gore with Looney Tunes. It’s tempting to call it satire, but satire exaggerates in order to prompt reflection and make a point. “Eddington” aims less for the moral lesson than full-on farce.

Yet the film can’t help but make a point, perhaps in spite of itself. People are scattered and sparse in many of the shots, both because of the grand Southwestern landscape and because everyone’s socially distanced. Thus emptied, the town looks a little destitute, like it’s seen better days and is susceptible to random acts of violence which, of course, it is. I found myself thinking of the photographs of Gregory Crewdson, who stages scenes of emptiness and decay capturing the desperate loneliness and isolation of life in small American towns and, as it turns out, Aster was thinking of Crewdson too: He invited the photographer to make a fine art print on the set.

And though my brain tingled with some other recognition while I watched “Eddington,” it wasn’t until my second viewing that I realized the zaps were coming from the region devoted to Todd Haynes’s eerie, disquieting 1995 movie “Safe.” I’ve been trying to figure out why, since the two films aren’t really the same at all — “Safe” is a psychological thriller, and “Eddington” is best described, I guess, as dystopian conspiracy western comedy. There are a few thematic harmonies; in the latter half of “Safe,” for instance, the suburban housewife Carol White (Julianne Moore) goes to a wellness retreat in New Mexico run by a guru somewhat similar in vibe, if not in appearance, to Vernon Jefferson Peak. Both films also have to do with the fear of contracting an illness that nobody can see and that nobody understands.

But the link, I think, is something more serious. In “Safe,” Carol’s life is already antiseptic and perfectly manicured, and the more her symptoms progress, the more she becomes isolated and less able to discern what is real. In “Eddington,” the screens drive the isolation, erecting imaginary barriers that make formerly unimaginable behavior seem not just conceivable but necessary. Both of these movies are fundamentally about living in a culture of heightened isolation, in which we begin to believe that simply being near one another means catching something bad; and both take a metaphorical tack, using real illness to stand in for a more metaphysical and social one. They show us visual worlds with people surrounded by empty space. What fills that empty space? We can only imagine. Bits of data. Unseen enemies. Honest threats. Threats we invent to ignore the real ones.

Eddington
Rated R for, oh, pretty much anything you can imagine, but mostly language and violence. Running time: 2 hours 28 minutes. In theaters.