‘Eddington’ Movie Review – Is It Worth Watching?

Eddington is a western thriller from horror filmmaker Ari Aster, based on a film idea he originally wanted to make before Hereditary and Midsommar. Now updated and set in the fictional town of Eddington, New Mexico, during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the film leans into a deliberately dated feel. It’s a creative choice many warned against when trying to entrench stories in this age, yet Aster uses the early days of the pandemic – when mask mandates were highly contestable and the virus’s severity was still unfolding – to paint a vivid portrait of a society in disarray.

The bizarre narrative centres on a small-town sheriff, Joe Cross, who decides to run against the incumbent mayor Ted Garcia, a progressive tech candidate whose campaign seems fuelled by plans for a new data centre. Holding a mirror up to modern America, this tale of polarisation, infighting and conspiracy theories can be a bitter pill to swallow, particularly since the outworkings of these contentious issues are still very much at play today.

As a western, it has parallels with Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, substituting Jack Nicholson’s gumshoe for a sheriff trying to get to the bottom of a conspiracy. Sprawling, wayward and divisive, there’s a meandering feel to Joe’s crude political campaign to topple his opponent. Joe uses every ounce of his influence to stick it to the mayor, while his emotionally unstable stay-at-home wife, Louise, becomes collateral damage when links to an earlier encounter with Garcia are brought to light.

“We come in peace.”

Trying to make sense of the swirling political landscape, gather support and protect his vulnerable wife, Joe attempts to stabilise growing community tensions around movements like Black Lives Matter and the encroaching coronavirus. But as external threats push the maddening situation further into destabilisation, he takes full advantage of the wild west scenario, pointing fingers in all directions.

Aster navigates a deeply layered story where distraction is the enemy, executing a bait-and-switch on a grand scale. The sheriff flounders as he tries to keep a lid on things. As the town steadily becomes a circus; displaced morality and chaos substitute any sense of order. Featuring an accomplished cast, creeping tension and a Napoleon Dynamite knack for awkward, offhanded and acerbic dark comedy, Eddington revels in its tension-filled, bizarre space.

Running at almost two and a half hours, it’s a bold and bleak immersion into a world falling apart. Still timely in spite of its rewind, the overall quality of the ingredients and Aster’s thoughtful excavation make for an intriguing and strangely compelling thrill ride. It does threaten to spiral out of control coming into land, ending on a deeply satirical note that feels a little inconsistent and perhaps overcooked. Since the central focus is so squarely on Joe and a deeply invested lead performance from Phoenix, the broader ensemble doesn’t quite get the same depth of character. While Eddington might have been better served as a long-form series to fully mine its sprawling cast and complex social issues, it still manages to wield a great deal of unsettling cinematic power with a haunting afterthought about the here and now.

The bottom line: Maddening