Eddington // Film Review

Eddington is at once a surprisingly faithful ode to the American Western and a miserably anxious recreation of Twitter and TikTok soundboards on the big screen. In a strange sense, it may actually be Ari Aster’s most straightforward film to date, yet it is no less grueling for its paranoid camera, neurotic speeches, and a script laden with characters speaking in stats and buzzwords they don’t remotely understand. If nothing else, it gives the phrase “terminally online” a whole new meaning.

Much has been made of the ostensible “two-sidedness” of Eddington, a film which pulls no punches in lambasting the most toxic and cringe-inducing corners of both the far right and left in contemporary America, which is a fair reading on certain levels. The film anchors us in the perspective of local sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), forcing us to see the world as a narrow-minded, stubborn conservative might (albeit through the prism of his outspokenly liberal performer). The Western format naturally positions town mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) as his opponent, therefore establishing a “broke versus woke” dichotomy which Aster has no issue playing out for much of the film’s first half.

There are ancillary characters at play here too, largely for comic effect; deputy sheriff Guy Tooley (Luke Grimes) has no qualms about wearing full body armour to confront a dozen teenagers, whereas militant protestor Sarah Allen (Amélie Hoeferle) is squirm-inducingly preachy for her many canned monologues, all clearly pulled directly off of what was then Twitter. Needless to say, there are very few clichés which Aster elects not to pursue; this is an all-encompassing satire in what has increasingly become a worryingly tribal medium.

That is not to say that Eddington is averse to choosing a side, however. Whereas Aster restrains himself to commentary appropriate to his chosen genre for much of the film’s first ninety minutes, the final hour unravels into an anxiety trip not dissimilar to his preceding work Beau Is Afraid. 

It is here that he begins to unravel the various knots of Cross as a character, revealing an ugly underbelly to the sheriff’s station and promptly setting it ablaze (figuratively, mostly). The back-and-forth rhetoric across the political spectrum may have escalated matters to these unruly heights, but in the end, it is undeniable who is left holding the gun, even if Aster is astute enough to allude to a greater power which may yet be to blame.

Eddington is not a particularly sophisticated tale, still falling short of its filmmaker’s earliest horror efforts, but it is the type of political swing which should be welcomed in present times, where breakdowns in communications between so-called “sides” and threats of controlled media are at an all time high. So long as A24 are prepared to keep funding Aster to put a camera on his most disturbed fever dreams, I am just as happy to keep watching.