Eddington

A Lonely, Lost, And Furious Triangle Of Separatism 

Ari Aster’s Eddington immediately approaches the line it’s expected to follow on a tightrope with a risk-taking sharpness, cutting that tightrope so that both sides fall further and further away from one another over 149 minutes. At the very center of this lonely, lost, and furious story are three people who have been seethingly waiting for the war they find themselves engaged in and yet have no real ability to deal with it. They work to promote separate agendas; they’re all depressed. Two of them are married, one of them is both a pawn and a potential perpetrator within that union. Their mental states operate on such a triangle of separatism that audiences have no choice but to take their words whilst in a growing state of discomfort and distrust as the stakes start to rise amongst the madness. 

I haven’t made Eddington sound particularly viewable. But it is. Eddington is one of those films where audiences have to do a lot of the work themselves, and only those who do get the most out of it. You’d think the kind of indie audiences who show up for films like Eddington would be willing to take that on and had Eddington been made a couple years ago, they may very well have been up for the challenge but I have no doubt that the MAGA and YouTube culture of 2025 will prove too real to endure analyzing Eddington afterwards. I fear those who see it as an exaggeration will fail to realize that that’s precisely Aster’s point. Not that the specific events that go down are an exaggeration, but that we as a nation and a culture embrace it that way because we can’t endure that the in-your-face proximity that Eddington replicates here is real. 

Truth is the birthday of generalization. Only with the truth are people so easily manipulated. It’s never the whole truth. Aster’s films have been about cults of various degrees and the growing “pain for profit” mentality that many fall victim to at various points. The most unlucky are the ones you can expect to see on full display here. Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) of Eddington, New Mexico, decides to run for Mayor against Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) after being long disillusioned with the mask mandates of COVID. The immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s barbaric murder fully severs the already culturally divided community of this desert small town (Of which the black population is relatively small), and all that’s left is to destroy the enemy in the hopes of victory. 

What Eddington gets so right in its portrait of cultural imbalance isn’t even the chaos but the despair. Most Americans of 2025, regardless of politics, can admit they’re furious, but a lot of us find it impossible to admit our misery. That kind of silence only leads to the violence Eddington gradually finds itself in, but so does the perspective of every character. Martin Scorsese and Guillermo del Toro both recently expressed praise for Eddington, which I hope will only enhance the conversations to be had from works like this. Scorsese rightfully points out that the film “Externalizes the emotional violence” behind its brutality. 

He continues by saying that “Eddington dives right into the side of American life that many people can’t bear to look at or even acknowledge - no one wants to listen to anyone else, which is frightening.” 

The three central performances are definitely among Eddington’s biggest strengths. The deep, profound sadness in Phoenix’s eyes has always been unmissable, and his descent into violence here is an entirely different beast than Joker. Pascal has an anger here that I’ve never seen from him before. He’s one of those actors who’s both an artist and a movie star. He has had a growing popularity for several years now. 2025 is his magnum opus of success, and he deserves every moment of it. Emma Stone’s Louisa Cross is the broken heart of Eddington.  She is outraged at her husband’s choice to run for Mayor. She sees the rivalry as a potential outlet for her past traumas, which proves to be correct. She’s dealt with them by making these strange and frightening yet adorable-looking dolls that sell well enough for her to cope. Stone’s performance is very childlike at times, but make no mistake: She is NOT Bella Baxter. Louise has no confidence. These dolls are so personal to her, and she falls apart on her bed, angrily insisting to Joe that his choice to run for Mayor will result in people coming to the house. She doesn’t want to be spoken badly about. She just wants to make her little dolls, causing no trouble while shutting out the big, bad world. She’s not agoraphobic, but she may as well be. Her growing sense of loyalty to an unstable but charismatic sexually abused cult leader (Austin Butler in a limited but unforgettable performance of both sheer terror and heartbreak) is apparent from the very first moment she arrives home with him and Joe and Ted’s rivalry crosses the line and becomes personal, it becomes impossible for Louise not to see her new idol as her ticket out leaving Joe with her judgemental conspiracy theory making mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell). 

Eddington makes MAGA’s eye-rolling obsession with pedophile equally impossible to overlook, but does point to a very real gut punch about the lostness of sexually abused children for whom so many go on to live lives as lost wolves silently howling at the moon for an alpha to love them. I thought of Bad Times At The El Royale in regards to Aster’s uncensored but honest handling of these people. Aster, like many filmmakers, got his start making horror films, and while Eddington isn’t a traditional horror film, it IS horrifying. It’s also a beautifully shot, horrifyingly and brilliantly written reckoning of a permanent American tragedy, a long time coming. 

Phenomenal game-changing cinema on all possible levels. It kicks you right in the gut, cuts open your stomach, disembowels your intestines, and abandons you to the slaughter of a nation contemplating its final descent off the remaining cliffs of sanity and fall into the abyss of ruin. It’s beyond devastating, but Aster’s heart and plea for audiences to contribute to a united societal outcome have never been more apparent than he is here. He sees the LOSTNESS in people, and his films are about the mental exploitation of those people once they can no longer hold on to reality. I doubt any of us can, but like the people of Eddington, there once had at least an opportunity to try. 

Eddington official streams for the full movie. (2025). KINOCHECK. https://cdn.kinocheck.com/i/ydnc91k96w.jpg