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Eddington gets the texture of early-pandemic America right: political disagreement hardens into identity, neighbors inhabit separate information worlds, and the internet turns fear into an always-on civic argument. But recognizing that atmosphere is not the same as shaping it into a successful film. Ari Aster’s fictional New Mexico standoff begins with a vivid local conflict, then sprawls across satire, conspiracy, and genre shifts without making those pieces cohere.
What is Eddington about?
A24 sets Eddington in May 2020, in a fictional New Mexico town where a standoff between Sheriff Joe Cross, played by Joaquin Phoenix, and Mayor Ted Garcia, played by Pedro Pascal, pits neighbor against neighbor. The conflict draws on disputes over masks and lockdowns, then widens into the pandemic’s conspiracies, political demonstrations, and online information flows. The A24 synopsis and the Directors Guild of America discussion establish the setup; neither presents the town as a real place or the film as a documentary account.
The sheriff-mayor rivalry gives Aster a useful scale for a huge subject. Instead of explaining the pandemic as a national history, the film watches public conflict enter a community and a household. Its 2020 setting also evokes racial and political demonstrations and the strain of following events through screens, as the Associated Press review notes. That makes the movie’s social atmosphere recognizable, not comprehensive: one fictional town cannot stand in for every community’s experience.
What does the film get right about the pandemic?
Its strongest insight is how ordinary disagreements became tests of identity. Masking and lockdowns were not merely practical questions in Eddington; they became signals of which authorities, neighbors, and sources of information a person trusted. The film’s online world intensifies that feeling: people absorb different accounts of events, grow more certain, and become harder to reach across those divides.
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That sense of isolation is close to Aster’s stated subject. In a Sight and Sound interview, he describes people living in “different realities” and looking through “different windows,” until they are “all totally unreachable to each other.” In a DGA discussion, he put the emotional aim more simply: “I wanted the movie to be really sad.” Those statements clarify the intended portrait of disconnection; they do not, by themselves, show that the film brings it off.
The Atlantic’s review calls the film “nasty and cynical—and also eerily accurate in its rendering of the digital reality of pandemic life.” That is one critic’s judgment, but it identifies the movie’s most persuasive quality: the way isolation and online outrage seem to feed each other. The accuracy here is atmospheric rather than documentary. Eddington captures a recognizable mood of fear, suspicion, and civic fracture; it does not offer a neutral record of policy or a representative account of the pandemic.
Rank #2
- Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Austin Butler
Why does the movie still fail?
The satire widens faster than the story
The mayor-sheriff dispute is a clean dramatic engine: a local conflict with consequences for people who know one another. As the film adds national politics, conspiratorial thinking, and broader social fracture, its focus weakens. The characters increasingly risk functioning as positions in an argument rather than people whose choices lead naturally from one conflict to the next.
That is the divide in the critical response. Sight and Sound describes the film as a Covid movie that “punches in all directions and misses,” while the Atlantic finds its digital portrait eerily accurate. The New Yorker also characterizes it as a self-satisfied COVID satire. These are distinct assessments, not a consensus—but the first points to the problem that limits the film for me: having many targets is not the same as building a sharp satirical point.
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Tonal shifts blur the emotional through-line
Aster has described Eddington as a horror film, and the Cannes festival account frames it around pandemic tensions and conspiracy theories. The film moves among dark comedy, political satire, western-inflected confrontation, and horror. That instability can suggest a world becoming impossible to read. Here, however, the shifts too often disrupt momentum instead of deepening dread. The movie’s sadness, which Aster says he wanted, is harder to feel when the tonal machinery keeps pulling attention elsewhere.
Symbolic conflict outruns personal stakes
The premise gives the conflict a local and personal frame, but the sheriff and mayor can become shorthand for opposing outlooks. Sight and Sound’s review notes the added complications of the mayor’s prior connection to the sheriff’s wife and the pressures of a household under lockdown. Such details could make the public argument intimate. The film’s widening scope, though, leaves less room for character development to carry the weight of its themes. The result is a movie with a strong diagnosis of social disconnection and a less convincing drama about the people living through it.
Rank #4
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Is Eddington a good movie?
It is an interesting, often recognizable one, but not a good one overall. Aster sees how pandemic-era politics could turn neighbors into opponents and the internet into a chamber of competing realities. He does not give those observations a sufficiently focused structure, stable emotional logic, or consistently dimensional characters. The atmosphere lands more clearly than the story.
That distinction matters: calling the pandemic texture accurate is not endorsing every choice the film makes, and calling the movie bad does not mean its subject is shallow. Eddington is most compelling as a portrait of distrust and least persuasive when its many satirical and genre ambitions have to work together as a coherent film.
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