Eddington (2025)
Directed by: Ari Aster
Premise: Set in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, a smalltown sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) is increasingly frustrated by the community’s lockdown policies. He declares his candidacy for mayor, putting the sheriff at odds with the incumbent (Pedro Pascal).
What Works: Eddington is a dark comedy that thrusts the audience into the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The filmmakers do an exceptional job of recreating that era and especially putting the audience back in the emotional headspace of the time. Eddington dramatizes the tension we all experienced while complying or resisting health policy mandates and the filmmakers exacerbate that tension by layering on other contemporaneous controversies, namely the Black Lives Matter movement that followed the murder of Black citizen George Floyd by a white police officer. What’s done especially well in Eddington is dramatizing the way national stories are localized. The sheriff and the mayor have preexisting personal conflicts which are exacerbated by state health policies. A white teenager becomes a Black Lives Matter activist in an attempt to impress his crush. The storytelling layers and personalizes the conflicts. Eddington is sardonic and savagely funny but there is also a great deal of humanity to the picture. It empathizes with these characters and their motives. This is not a partisan hack job ridiculing one political wing or another; viewers may see themselves in some of these characters and Eddington challenges us to understand other people’s perspectives but also to recognize the ridiculousness of some of our own ideas and behaviors from that time. Eddington is partly about the lure of conspiracy theories and the way abstract online paranoia becomes a reality. Conspiracy theories are attractive because they streamline the chaos of life, making it graspable. Eddington has a vivid sense of spiraling doom and chaos as the community becomes increasingly destabilized and the sheriff struggles to maintain control of his life.
What Doesn’t: About two-thirds of the way through, the story takes a turn that transforms the nature of the film. The filmmakers build up to that moment. It’s a shock but a motivated one. At that point, Eddington transitions from a broad recreation of 2020 pandemic politics to a more narrowly focused and personal crime story. That switch is not a bad choice but the early portion of Eddington is such an engrossing recreation of the pandemic era that the second half isn’t quite as strong. Eddington ends on an extended coda sequence. It’s a satisfying ending but it goes on a little long.
Bottom Line: Eddington is a visceral, smart, and funny portrait of the madness of 2020. It’s also humane with empathetic characters who have complex inner lives. Not since Paul Schrader’s First Reformed has a film distilled the anxiety of contemporary American culture with this much incisiveness and empathy.
Episode: #1059 (August 3, 2025)