15 Jun SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL – ‘Eddington’ is self-satisfied, scatterbrained, and ultimately inert
We are still too close to the COVID-19 pandemic for most people to be nostalgic for it, let alone eager to relive the peculiar, surreal dread that accompanied it. And yet, with Eddington, director Ari Aster seems determined to trap his audience inside the worst of that era’s paranoia, partisanship, and posturing without offering anything that might justify the return trip. There’s a version of this film that could have worked. Sadly, it’s not the film we’re given.
This may have been a politically sharp black comedy with real ideas about the way a broken America broke even further under pressure, a story about disinformation and delusion, about the profound isolation we all experienced as we stared into the abyss of uncertainty. But Aster doesn’t seem especially interested in exploring any of that with clarity or conviction. Instead, Eddington adopts the pose of a satire, layering on references and provocations like a collage of social media posts. The result is a film that is self-satisfied, scatterbrained, and ultimately inert.
Set in the fictional New Mexico town of Eddington during the summer of 2020, the film follows Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), a disgruntled, asthmatic sheriff who refuses to wear a face mask, claims COVID isn’t real in his town, and styles himself as the last bastion of masculine sanity in a world gone mad. Tired of lockdowns and restrictions, and suspicious of anything resembling progressive rhetoric, Joe is slowly becoming a local hero to the similarly fed-up townsfolk.
His adversary is the town’s slick, liberal mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), a man of empty charisma and social media savvy who’s campaigning for reelection and enforcing strict public health measures. After a personal revelation involving his wife, Louise (Emma Stone), Joe decides to challenge Ted politically, setting off a slow-motion war of ideologies, power grabs, and personal grudges. What begins as a culture clash set to the rhythm of lockdown-era grievances gradually spirals into something louder and messier. Joe, flanked by his loyal deputies Guy (Luke Grimes) and Michael (Micheal Ward), mounts a clumsy, populist campaign rooted in the idea that Eddington doesn’t need to change.
Meanwhile, his home life crumbles. Louise retreats into an eerie obsession with a cult-like influencer (Austin Butler) while also enduring her own mother, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), a conspiracy theorist holed up in their home spouting every absurd idea the internet ever coughed up. Tensions in the town escalate. Protests ignite. Conspiracies bloom. Guns come out. And what starts as a deadpan western with political aspirations eventually mutates into a blood-soaked farce of chaos and disarray.
There is no doubt that Aster can construct an image. His technical command as a filmmaker remains intact, with cinematographer Darius Khondji once again giving the desert landscapes of New Mexico a desolate, sun-bleached eeriness that fits the mood. A few sequences hum with atmosphere. There’s an early moment when Joe patrols a near-abandoned supermarket that captures the strange emptiness of that early pandemic fear. Aster still knows how to stage tension, how to hold a shot just long enough for the absurdity to curdle into menace. There’s something powerful in the way Phoenix plays certain scenes with visible weariness, a man teetering between delusion and defeat. And Stone, even in a role that gives her far too little to do, commits herself fully to Louise’s peculiar inner life. These small victories keep the film from collapsing entirely.
But they are not enough. Eddington is a film bloated with ambition and cripplingly vague about what it actually wants to say. Satire demands focus. It requires intent. It thrives on specificity. But Aster’s script lunges in every direction at once, mocking the performative left and the delusional right with equal vigour and no discernible point of view. One moment it’s lampooning influencer culture and social justice language, the next it’s skewering conspiracy theorists and Trumpian masculinity. But rather than feeling like a bold refusal to take sides, the film’s worldview becomes one of tired cynicism. It’s not a commentary, it’s a shrug in cinematic form. When you satirise everything, you become a satire of nothing.
There’s a key line from the film’s sheriff, Joe, that encapsulates the film’s mentality: “COVID’s real. It’s just not here.” It’s a funny line. But the film seems unsure of whether it wants to laugh with him or at him. And that uncertainty plagues the entire story. It’s clear Aster sees Joe as ridiculous. He’s a man clinging to outdated notions of authority, terrified of his own irrelevance. But the film never quite condemns him. It never quite supports him either. Pascal’s mayor is also presented as a fraud, a careerist riding waves of progressive language while offering nothing of substance. Their conflict is presented as a hollow spectacle, and in the process, the film accidentally becomes what it’s trying to mock.
The script checks off every cultural flashpoint from the era, but few are explored beyond surface references. A Black Lives Matter protest erupts with little context or consequence. Zoom calls are mined for tired gags. Mask mandates are invoked endlessly but never interrogated. Pronoun discourse, QAnon conspiracies, Instagram influencers, viral challenges, police brutality, even George Floyd’s murder. All of it appears, but none of it feels earned. The inclusion of Floyd’s death is especially ill-advised, treated with the same glib detachment as everything else, and used primarily to spark more shallow commentary about teenage activism. It’s a cynical provocation, one of several moments where Aster seems more interested in stirring up controversy than offering insight.
The film’s tone is another major issue. It lurches wildly between dour realism and exaggerated farce, never settling into a consistent register. One moment might play like an arthouse western, all long silences and grim stares. The next it’s indulging in TikTok montages and cartoonish shootouts. By the time the final act explodes into nonsensical chaos, it’s hard to know whether we’re meant to be horrified, amused, or simply resigned. The tonal whiplash drains any real emotional engagement. Even the violence, which becomes operatic and excessive by the end, feels more like a concession to Aster’s fans than something organically earned by the narrative.
Phoenix is doing variations on his Beau Is Afraid persona again here, all broken masculinity and anxious unravelling. He’s compelling, as always, but Joe is too underwritten to anchor the film. We never learn what drives him beyond vague resentment. Is he power-hungry? Lonely? Lost? A relic of a world that no longer exists? A true believer in his own warped ideology? The film seems to think ambiguity equals depth, but instead it leaves its central figure as a cipher. Stone, meanwhile, is stuck playing a parody of a character, her storyline full of surreal quirks that add up to very little. Her scenes often feel like they belong to a different, better film; something weirder, riskier, more coherent in its madness, like we’ve seen in Stone’s work with Yorgos Lanthimos.
Pascal has some fun as the slick politician who hides cowardice behind charm, but like most of the characters, Ted Garcia never becomes more than an idea. The supporting cast fares no better. Grimes and Ward are mostly decorative, and even Butler, whose influencer character should be a rich source of comedy or horror, is reduced to cryptic soundbites and blank stares. These characters exist only to deliver points, not to be people. They function as walking thinkpieces, not flesh-and-blood presences.
And yet, perhaps the most frustrating thing about Eddington is that it almost could have worked. Buried beneath the indulgence and incoherence, there are glimpses of a sharper film. One that might have truly reckoned with the way COVID deepened American divisions, exposed our moral rot, and revealed the fragility of the systems we rely on. Aster seems to understand that the pandemic broke something in the national psyche, but he doesn’t know how to dramatise that without leaning on caricature and chaos. He treats every cultural issue as a punchline, then seems surprised when the audience stops laughing.
The irony is that Aster, for all his reputation as a boundary-pusher, plays it oddly safe here. By refusing to take a firm stance, he avoids any real risk. The film mocks everyone, but in doing so, it insulates itself from criticism. It’s the same trap many contemporary satires fall into, mistaking balance for boldness. A sharp satirist should understand that not every joke carries the same weight. Eventually, you have to stand for something. Taking aim at everyone without purpose isn’t balance, it’s cowardice disguised as wit.
That, more than anything, is what leaves Eddington feeling hollow. It’s not just that it’s a tonal mess or that its script is shallow and overstuffed. It’s that the film’s defining attitude is one of smug detachment. It’s a film that looks at the chaos of the past five years and says, “Isn’t this all ridiculous?” without ever offering a reason why we should care. It expects credit for daring to wade into the muck but does so in rubber boots, refusing to get dirty. It’s not brave. It’s not insightful. It’s not even all that provocative. It’s just tired.
If there’s one thing Aster’s early work had in spades, it was conviction. Hereditary and Midsommar were brutal, unflinching portraits of grief and madness. Even Beau Is Afraid, for all its divisiveness, felt like a personal howl from the void. Eddington feels like a Twitter thread come to life. All noise, no core. It’s the kind of film that thinks saying something inflammatory is the same as having something to say. Aster has claimed in interviews that the film is meant to reflect the confusion of the moment, but there’s a difference between reflecting confusion and simply being confused.
There will be defenders of Eddington, no doubt. Some will argue that its messiness is the point, that it captures the zeitgeist in all its absurdity. Others will point to its performances, its visuals, its moments of biting humour. But none of that changes the fact that the film is a chore and often a genuine bore. It is exhausting in the way bad satire always is, so pleased with itself that it forgets to entertain, to illuminate, or even to bother making sense.
Aster may believe he’s captured the degradation and segregation of America, but in the end, all he’s done is repackage it. Eddington doesn’t challenge the moment we’re in. It simply wallows in it. The result is a film that thinks it’s indicting a broken society but ends up embodying its worst tendencies: empty outrage, shallow commentary, and the illusion that being loudly cynical is the same thing as being smart.
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Austin Butler, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O’Connell, Micheal Ward, Clifton Collins Jr.
Director: Ari Aster
Producers: Lars Knudsen, Ari Aster, Ann Ruark
Screenplay: Ari Aster
Cinematography: Darius Khondji
Production Design: Elliott Hostetter
Costume Design: Anna Terrazas
Editor: Lucian Johnston
Music: Bobby Krlic, Daniel Pemberton
Running Time: 145 minutes
Release Date: 21st August 2025 (Australia)