Ari Aster’s Eddington begins with a local election and a standoff between a sheriff and a mayor, then lets the pressures of May 2020 push their New Mexico town toward rupture. Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal anchor a hybrid of political Western, paranoid thriller and dark comedy. Its central idea—that people caught in the same crisis can inhabit unreachable realities—is compelling; whether the film’s shifts in tone make that idea illuminating or merely overwhelming is the harder question.
What is Eddington about?
Set in May 2020 in fictional Eddington, New Mexico, the film follows sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and incumbent mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) as their conflict intensifies. Garcia wants to modernize the town by attracting a proposed artificial-intelligence data center. Cross runs against him, and a local political contest becomes entangled with pandemic-era tensions and a wider breakdown among neighbors. That is the premise, not the whole plot: the film’s escalating turns are best encountered without a detailed synopsis.
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Eddington Blu-ray | Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal | Region Free | $30.22 | Buy on Amazon |
A24’s official synopsis describes the sheriff-mayor standoff as a powder keg; the Cannes editorial situates it amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Aster’s setting is deliberately specific, but the town is fictional. Cannes reports that the film was shot in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
How does the Western work in a world of phones?
The film borrows the Western’s familiar fault line: a sheriff, a town, a contest for authority and the prospect of violence. But the frontier here is also a media environment. Aster put it plainly in A24’s production notes: “Eddington is a Western, but the guns are phones.” The line is a useful key to the film’s design, not a claim that every conflict is reducible to social media.
#1 Best Overall
- Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Austin Butler
Phones make private conviction public and immediate; the data center proposal points toward a different scale of power, one connected to investment and infrastructure. The film places those forces beside the face-to-face struggle between Cross and Garcia. Its strongest conceptual move is to make the town’s conflict feel both intimate and exposed to systems larger than any one character.
That ambition also creates a question the film cannot answer simply: are its characters shaped mainly by their choices, by the feeds and feedback around them, by the economic promise of modernization, or by all three pressing on one another? Aster said he wanted to examine people caught in “feedback” whose bubbles collide. That stated intention helps explain the construction, but the finished film still has to make the people inside the metaphor feel like people.
Does the satire leave room for character?
Aster described his approach to the Directors Guild of America as sociological: “I wanted to understand all of these people and, for me, they’re all kind of gripped by this yearning.” That framing suits a movie interested in more than assigning its characters to political camps. Their appetites, fears and need to be heard matter as much as the positions they occupy.
The risk is that a broad national allegory can flatten a small town into a row of recognizable types. Eddington invites viewers to look for humanity in people they might otherwise dismiss, but empathy is not the same as equivalence. Understanding why someone believes something does not require treating every belief or action as equally sound or consequential. That distinction is central to whether the film’s portrait of division feels perceptive rather than evasive.
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In a December 2025 interview with BFI Sight and Sound, Aster described a story about people “living in different realities and looking at the world through different windows,” unreachable to one another. He also said it was important to find humanity in people one abhors and to question where one’s own beliefs come from. These comments clarify the movie’s intended moral posture; they do not settle how successfully it sustains it on screen.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Do the tonal shifts sharpen the film or derail it?
Eddington moves among dark comedy, social drama, political fear and thriller-like escalation. The comedy can expose the absurdity of people trying to impose order on a situation that keeps slipping beyond them. The dread, in turn, gives the jokes a harder edge. But the same instability can make it difficult to know what emotional register the film wants a scene to hold.
This is not an accidental mismatch between a straightforward story and an intrusive joke; the genre mixture is part of the film’s method. The question is whether each shift deepens the sense of a community losing its shared bearings or simply redirects attention. Viewers who enjoy Aster’s willingness to unsettle genre expectations may find the uncertainty productive. Those looking for a consistently grounded political drama may experience it as misdirection.
What does the reception say?
Rotten Tomatoes’ listing, accessed October 4, 2026, showed a 69% Tomatometer from 287 reviews and a 66% Popcornmeter from more than 1,000 verified ratings. Those are platform snapshots, not a poll of all viewers, and can change. The site’s critics consensus praises the cast and Aster’s fearless direction while saying the story’s tonal misdirection may leave viewers wanting.
That split offers a useful description of the film’s wager, rather than a verdict a viewer has to accept. The same formal audacity that makes Eddington hard to classify can feel like an honest expression of collective disorientation—or like a reason the drama never settles into one persuasive shape.
Who is in the film?
A24 lists Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O’Connell, Micheal Ward, Amélie Hoeferle, Clifton Collins Jr., William Belleau, Austin Butler and Emma Stone in the principal cast. Ari Aster wrote and directed the film. The ensemble spans the town’s intersecting pressures, while Phoenix and Pascal give its central political contest its two most prominent poles.
Where can you watch Eddington?
When Rotten Tomatoes was accessed on October 4, 2026, its listing showed HBO Max streaming and Fandango rental or purchase. Availability, service names and terms can vary by territory and change over time, so check the film’s current listing in your region before subscribing or renting.
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