Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) of Eddington, New Mexico, is in COVID-19 lockdown with his gloomy wife, Louise (Emma Stone), and her mother, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell). It’s May 2020, and the three are bubbled up. Louise and Dawn gradually slip into a swirl of conspiracy, while Joe butts heads with the local government over mask mandates. Despite the tight quarters, there is a vast distance between them. Each day of the pandemic brings this bubble one step closer to popping. No doubt, this pressure chamber is a setting familiar to many of us.
One night, after a rare flicker of intimacy between Joe and Louise goes dark, the lovesick lawman rolls away from her and retreats into the glow of his phone. He is swallowed by a feed brimming with outrage, half-truths, and algorithmic comforts that are easier to face than his wife beside him. Yes, it’s the now-quotidian doomscroll. It’s this escape that defuses any explosion, a guaranteed distraction that balks at any real reckoning with the problems outside (and within) the walls. This, too, is awfully familiar.
That isolation—and the paranoia it breeds—is what Eddington zeroes in on. It’s the kind of psychic terrain director Ari Aster loves. First championed for Hereditary (2018), a domestic tragedy veined with the occult, and then Midsommar (2019), a breakup movie recast as folk horror, Aster made his name chronicling the slow unraveling of ordinary people under extreme pressure. In 2023, he turned inward with Beau Is Afraid, a personally charged epic that spiraled so far into absurdity that Aster lost the reins. This year, Eddington drops us into the tumultuous summer we lived through five years ago, placing pandemic panic under harsh light. Aster cashes in his humor and taste for the absurd to craft the best film on the subject to date.
Eddington (2025)
R, 148 min. Wide release in theaters
a24films.com/films/eddington
Eddington investigates how, that summer, the very innovations meant to bring us together—smartphones, social media, and the Internet—instead inflamed our isolation. A socially distanced country went online to find solace, but rapidly, communities (or really, individuals) fell prey to their self-built echo chambers. Suddenly, everyone was an expert, and everyone else was an idiot.
In Aster’s hands, a fictional small town in New Mexico (the state where he was raised) becomes a microcosm of America’s spiritual freefall that spares no one: the left, the right, the indifferent. He charts how information, funneled through our phones straight into our nerves, turned people into voiceboxes, regurgitating headlines and Instagram posts on command. The film’s most unsettling truth isn’t that people are misinformed, but that perhaps we crave something to fear—a chance to signal virtue on either side. Aster pushes further: Would we be prepared if our worst fears were to prove true?
Credit: courtesy A24
Joe, already weary, is pushed to the edge by the one-two punch of romantic bitterness and political frustration. He loathes Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), the face of everything he hates in politics, and notably, an ex-boyfriend of Louise from more than two decades prior. Ted enforces COVID-era mandates with performative zeal, cloaking his tech-funded campaign with a shield of progressivism. Tensions boil over when Joe defends a local who refuses to wear a mask at the grocery store. Ted confronts him, rattling off rehearsed statistics. For Ted, it’s not about being right; it’s about appearing right. That’s when Joe decides to run for mayor. By the next day, his car is plastered with global conspiracy slogans, proof, he claims, of what he’s protecting Eddington from. He tells Ted point-blank: COVID isn’t a “here problem.”
This mayoral race in a town of just 2,435 is less about policy than it is about how information is weaponized. While Ted is emblematic of spineless liberalism, playing the good guy to gain support, Joe is exemplary of real-life candidates who refuse to “play by the rules” by spreading fear and slander. It shows us how, at the height of COVID, talking points splintered into paranoia, and how, in the chaos, people could say anything and be believed. Joe might be a totem of right-wing extremism, bolstered by an onslaught of misinformation campaigns, but in truth, he’s also a victim of the powers that control the flow of information.
Credit: courtesy A24
The real danger lurks behind the progressive sheen of Ted’s campaign: a tech company, absurdly named SolidGoldMagikarp (AI lingo or Pokémon?), is planning to move into Eddington. This company is poised to soak up local resources without any consideration for the neighboring citizens. (Call Erin Brockovich.) Because everyone is hyperaware of the problems facing American society—and the world at large—something sinister has slipped through the cracks amid the noise of conflict and virtue signaling.
The ensuing chaos is amplified when the national uprisings sparked by George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police begin to trickle into Eddington through its teenagers, who mimic activism more than understand it. A sense of impending collapse hangs over the place. The town’s anxieties are inflated by one source or another, inciting small clashes and broken windows on the streets, and stoking worries among the sheriff’s deputies, Guy (Luke Grimes) and Michael (Micheal Ward), about antifa storming in.
Far less outwardly horrifying than Aster’s first three films, [Eddington] simmers in the dread of its characters.
One of the film’s most damning (and funny) subplots follows Brian (Cameron Mann), the mayor’s best friend’s son, who becomes “radicalized” by the leftist movements. This is solely thanks to his crush on a girl named Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), who’s carrying her Angela Davis book in an abandoned lot where the local teens drink beer. Soon, Brian is leading Black Lives Matter protests on Main Street and ranting about white privilege to his parents. In Brian, Aster satirizes how, during this time, ideology became fashioned for social capital, particularly in the way Brian’s arc wraps up (on the other side of the aisle).
As Joe spirals into politics and paranoia, another belief system creeps into his home. Louise and Dawn are drawn into the orbit of Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), a charismatic, tattooed influencer who live-streams wellness gospel with a steady drip of conspiratorial dread. (At first, it’s disappointing how little attention Stone and Butler get.) This drifting echoes how many of us felt after that summer, returning to “regular life” to find loved ones fanatically following new ideologies. In this time alone, many people found ways to feel vindicated, no matter what the cost.
Credit: courtesy A24
Admittedly, Aster is handling a lot, and this makes parts of the movie muddled. Still, this mirrors the information bombardment we faced. It’s hard to parse out the truth. Here, the digital world is a bait and switch.
It’s a far cry from how the Internet was imagined 30 years ago in films like the 1995 cyberpunk movie Hackers, which portrayed it as a chaotic frontier where anyone could expose corruption and build something freer. The digital world was intended to connect people, empowering them and fostering individuality. Eddington suggests that that future never came. Awareness, once a tool for solidarity, now serves self-absorption and cultural paranoia, leveraged by corporate and political powers. We process information through the warped lens of our personal fears and algorithms. The horror of lockdown wasn’t that we were alone then, but that we remain isolated now.
Like all of Aster’s films, the third act is a frantically accelerating manifestation of the character’s fears. The turning point comes with a jarring needle drop: Katy Perry’s “Firework.” (You have to hand it to Aster, he knows how to pick a song.) When Joe broadcasts a story accusing Ted of assaulting his wife, Louise responds by recording a video denying the claim. Joe is publicly humiliated and, for the first time, truly alone. In his isolation, every fear—and violent thought—he’s nursed begins to materialize.
Aster manages to spike tension without losing the reins over two-and-a-half hours thanks to the sharp cinematography by Darius Khondji, who has made us stir in our seats several times over in nerve-racking films such as David Fincher’s Seven (1995) and the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems (2019). From one loaded confrontation to another, Khondji places us uncomfortably close to the action as it unfolds across this isolated desert town. All the while, Daniel Pemberton and Bobby Krlic’s score thrums with unease, each scene infiltrated by what sounds like a discordant rendition of some bygone western classics.
In Eddington, the real virus is what corrodes our common ground. Far less outwardly horrifying than Aster’s first three films, it simmers in the dread of its characters. The fallout of 2020 is difficult to confront because we’re still reckoning with what happened. For some, the damage crept in quietly; for others, it exploded without warning. When Eddington erupts, it’s blunt. (There is a literal dumpster fire.) It wasn’t individual choices that undid us so much as the systems that failed to protect us—machinations of capitalism that prioritized profit over care, leaving the most vulnerable to face the worst. Our error was turning on individuals, rather than those in power. What’s left is a population more paranoid, more isolated, and more convinced than ever that the truth is whatever confirms their fear.
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