This ‘deranged’ starry thriller about the US’s pandemic divisions will ‘leave you breathless’

Midsommar and Hereditary director Ari Aster is once again set to shock with this surreal, gory western featuring Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal, which is premiering at the Cannes Film Festival.

Ari Aster’s first two films, Hereditary and Midsommar, were adored by fans of so-called “elevated horror”, but his third film, 2023’s Beau is Afraid, was more divisive: even its fans admitted that Aster’s psychedelic therapy session was on the self-indulgent side. His fourth film is slightly less excessive and sprawling – which makes it more excessive and sprawling than almost any other film you’re likely to see this year. If Beau is Afraid seemed to be about Aster’s own fears and neuroses, Eddington is about the more general fears and neuroses of the US in the year 2020. The writer-director puts everything into his blackly comic modern western – Covid-19 and online conspiracy theories, Black Lives Matter and white privilege, cult leaders and cryptocurrency – even if he can’t quite work out how to weave all of those subjects together. The film would probably have been better if it had been more focused (and shorter), but Aster’s deranged vision makes most directors seem timid in comparison. 

His central idea is that all of the US’s most contentious talking points are squeezed into the tiny desert town of Eddington, New Mexico. Joaquin Phoenix stars as a shambling, barely competent sheriff, Joe, who likes to argue that none of these problems are “here problems”: yes, the pandemic is terrible, and yes, the killing of George Floyd was a disgraceful crime, but they don’t affect remote and dusty Eddington, so why should he wear a mask, and why should he put up with anti-racism demonstrations? Anyway, he has plenty of more personal aggravations to worry about. The town’s mayor, Ted (Pedro Pascal), has signed a deal allowing a vast tech-hub to be built nearby; Joe’s wife, Louise (Emma Stone), has longstanding anxieties that may or may not be related to the mayor; and his mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) is obsessed by his own inadequacies as a sheriff and a husband. Joe’s solution to his disgruntlement, which is as ill-thought-through as everything else he does, is to run against Ted as an anti-lockdown candidate in the imminent mayoral election.

For a while, both the film and the sheriff ramble slowly and repetitively from place to place, from subject to subject, and from genre to genre. Eddington is both a quirky lampoon of small-town politics and a feverish state-of-the-nation satire – and that can be a jarring combination. You watch it with a mixture of detached respect that Aster is ticking off issues ignored by so many films, gloom that he is so pessimistic about those issues, mild amusement at the eccentricity of it all, and frustration that he doesn’t just find a plot and stick to it. Viewers may also experience the thrum of constant, headache-inducing stress – not because a particular character is in danger, but because almost all of the characters are so ignorant and antagonistic that it always feels as if a bleak situation is about to get disastrously worse. As he has shown in Beau is Afraid, Joker, You Were Never Really Here and more, Phoenix is a master of being uncomfortable in his own skin, and the querulous sheriff he plays is sympathetic, even at his most wrongheaded, because he has a habit of making things worse for himself than for everyone else.

It’s not until Eddington is somewhere around the halfway mark that it really speeds up, when a murder transforms the film into a farcical crime thriller with echoes of the Coen brothers’ Fargo and No Country for Old Men, as well as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice (another example of delirious auteur excess which starred Phoenix). The sheriff’s investigation doesn’t fit too snugly with all the satire and tragicomedy that have gone before: Austin Butler’s cameo as a cool new-age demagogue could have been cut, and Stone is given perplexingly little to do. But the tension and the intrigue heighten, and the outcome suddenly seems to matter.

And then, just when you’re being drawn into the murder plot, Eddington takes another turn. Its low-level strangeness jumps to surreal and gory heights – and it keeps going higher until it hits a peak of gonzo high-adrenaline fun that leaves you reeling and breathless. Many viewers will have had enough of the film long before then, but there is something heroic about Aster’s uncompromising determination to go his own way. It’s amazing, too, that he has got away with such an unhinged project so soon after Beau is Afraid. The overstuffed nature of Eddington suggests that the US’s conflicts in the 21st Century were ultimately too much for him to process. But you have to hand it to him for trying.