Eddington by Ari Aster

Last updated on May 17, 2025

A film by Ari Aster

With: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Austin Butler, Deirdre O’Connell, Amélie Hoeferle, Matt Gomez Hidaka, Luke Grimes, Micheal Ward, Cameron Mann

In May of 2020, a standoff between a small-town sheriff and mayor sparks a powder keg as neighbor is pitted against neighbor in Eddington, New Mexico.

Our rate 1: –

A chaotic film, heavy all the way through, with a patchwork plot, which purports to be funny, explosive, grating or who knows what, but is nothing of the sort. Long, poorly paced, multiplying clichés and lowbrow reflections – the film is clearly inspired by Trump and thinks of itself as subversive – the first hour and a half, a sort of set-up, familiarizes us with the idiot, sorry the village sheriff, his political ambitions and his close entourage. It drags on and on, beating around the bush. We then wait for the story of the famous turn the film might take. We wait a long time, and when it comes, the cream pie effect doesn’t work much more, or else on the side of indigestion that badly turned and stuffed cream can lead to. What’s this misfire doing in selection, one wonders. If the first half of the film resembles some very uninspired (and inspiring) Coen, with caricatured characters who aren’t funny, and above all pastiches of a hyper-connected, hyper-idiot world – the political message behind the film quickly distresses us with its lack of intelligence -, the second, or rather the last half-hour, feels Tarantino-like. But neither the Coens nor Tarantino could be equalled by anybody. American-style comedy requires talent (which Ari Aster may have – Midsommar, for example, offered something singular), radicalism, corrosive humor and radicalism, all of which are replaced here by tedious childishness. Some may say that we’ve missed the point of the film, that we haven’t perceived the vertigo of reflection… Yes, Aster is trying to represent, as Wes Anderson so often does, a small world in abstraction from a larger one, and his Eddington is no more and no less than a miniature representation of the United States. But that’s as far as we’re interested in, and neither is the all-out performance of the high-caliber cast.