Ari Aster’s Eddington (2025) is a jagged political mirror—scattershot with ideas, audacious in tone—and somehow plays like a slow-burn powder-keg farce that detonates exactly when it means to. Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival to chilly early notices, the film was quickly read as opportunistic, a movie “profiting” off COVID lockdowns and the George Floyd protests rather than meaningfully engaging with them. But taken on its own terms, Eddington is a bracingly self-reflective work: an American fever dream about paranoia, doomscrolling, and the grifters who materialize when anxiety becomes a commodity. This Eddington review won’t convince everyone, but it argues the film is much richer—and riskier—than the knee-jerk reactions suggested.
Set in spring 2020 in the titular New Mexico town, Eddington tracks the fraying of civic life as liberal mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) seeks reelection under pandemic pressure. Our way in is Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), a man whose late-night social media habit has replaced intimacy with his wife Louise (Emma Stone) and whose growing sense of persecution primes him for manipulation. Aster stages the first hour with unnerving restraint; the filmmaking is immaculate and slightly disorienting, toying with perspective before revealing how much of what we’re seeing is filtered through Joe’s insecurity and credulousness. One of the movie’s funniest, bleakest running gags—Joe’s campaign slogan, “your being manipulated,” plastered everywhere with the wrong “your”—works as both character sketch and thesis statement. He’s not the sharpest in the room, but he’s convinced he can bridge “common sense” folks and those he believes are being spun by politicized propaganda. That confidence curdles fast.
What begins as a taut, grounded political portrait tilts into satire and then blood-slick nightmare. As Joe mounts a reactionary mayoral run against Garcia, the town becomes a petri dish for opportunists and snake-oil peddlers who monetize outrage in real time. Aster’s second half is angrier, broader, and purposefully fantastical—an escalation from procedural unease to carnivalesque violence, where institutions and online feedback loops blur into one engine of grievance. The isolation of Eddington—both the place and the movie’s design—keeps the tension invisible until it breaks, and when it does, it’s not subtle.
The ensemble is uniformly sharp. Phoenix charts Joe’s slide from aggrieved civil servant to volatile candidate without asking for pity. Emma Stone brings warmth and wary distance to Louise. Pedro Pascal plays Garcia with practiced optimism that reads differently depending on which echo chamber you inhabit. Around them, Aster populates the town with micro-grifters and true believers who feel chillingly recognizable. The filmmaking—stately compositions, surgical cutting, and a dry comic pulse—recalls the precision of Midsommar while channeling the anarchic, abrasive humor that made Beau Is Afraid so polarizing.
If Eddington falters, it’s in how proudly messy it is. The film’s scattershot approach means certain provocations read muddled or on-the-nose, and its willingness to swing from straight drama to gaudy satire will alienate viewers who prefer clean moral lines. But the mess is, in many ways, the point. Aster isn’t adjudicating 2020; he’s staging how quickly fear, loneliness, and algorithmic outrage can hollow out a town’s shared reality. That he does it with jokes that sting and images that bruise makes Eddington both infuriating and thrilling.
READ MORE MOVIE REVIEWS: Ballerina, Weapons, Happy Gilmore 2
Aster lost some mainstream goodwill with the maximalist chaos of Beau Is Afraid; in a way, Eddington feels like the sharper follow-up to Midsommar that might have maintained his broader audience. It’s still divisive, still confrontational, but it’s also gripping, incisive, and painfully timely. However you read its politics, Eddington is a film worth talking about—and a reminder that Ari Aster remains one of the few American filmmakers willing to wrestle, loudly and imperfectly, with the country’s splintered soul.
Score: 8/10
Eddington (2025)
- Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Deirdre O’Connell, Emma Stone, Micheal Ward, Pedro Pascal, Cameron Mann, Matt Gomez Hidaka, Luke Grimes, Amélie Hoeferle, Austin Butler
- Director: Ari Aster
- Genre: Comedy, Crime, Western
- Runtime: 149 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: July 16, 2025
- Movies Like Eddington: Killers of the Flower Moon, No Country for Old Men, Magnolia, More Movies Like Eddington
