Eddington

Directed by Ari Aster
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone
Released 22 August
7/10

It’s May 2020 in the small New Mexico town of Eddington (pop. 2,345) and Sheriff Joe Cross (a grizzled, befuddled Joaquin Phoenix) is beginning to lose the plot. He struggles with the Covid mask mandate, partly because of his asthma, partly because he sees no evidence of the disease in his small isolated town, but mostly because it’s just not in the spirit of America, goddammit, to interfere in people’s personal liberty.

What’s more, his conspiracy-poisoned mother-in-law (Deirdre O'Connell) has moved into their domestic bubble, and his troubled wife (Emma Stone) is growing ever more distant. He patrols the deserted streets in the evening in his shabby old white hat, mocked by the local teens who film him trying to apprehend local hobos and post his humiliations to TikTok.

His frustrations find a focus in local mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), whose publicity presents him as right-on hero of the community, but who is secretly in bed with a tech company scheming to bring a resource-heavy hyperscale data center to the town (and who used to be in bed with Joe’s wife). After one bad day too many, Sheriff Joe decides he just can’t take it any more, and starts his own Mayoral campaign.

So far so conventional? The struggle between flinty, independent frontiersmen and the arrival of strange new technologies is at the heart of every classic western from The Great Train Robbery through High Noon to The Wild Bunch, and the battle between Sheriff Joe and Mayor Ted for the soul of Eddington looks all set to be a rich new addition to the venerable canon.

But this is an Ari Aster film. Having made his name with the “elevated horror” of Hereditary and Midsommar, he seemed determined to prove that he couldn’t be boxed into genre. 2023’s rambling, sprawling and wilfully demented Beau Is Afraid was the result - something like Woody Allen trying to make a David Lynch movie, and possibly the shaggiest Jewish mother joke ever made.

Fans who hoped that Aster had got all the indulgence out of his system with the splurge of Beau may be frustrated. After shaping up as a darkly funny modern western, Eddington goes sensationally off the rails, aiming a scattershot satirical shot gun at everything from BLM to QAnon, repressed memory cults to stolen land narratives, spiralling to a tense, terrifying and bloody climax.

Aster has said he wanted to make a film that “feels like today”, that has the same vertiginous rush as the daily doomscroll. Eddington is in many ways a film about reality collapse, the loss of a consensus narratives, a western world where there’s no white-hatted Gary Cooper lawman on the horizon to re-establish the rules and save the day. Eddington is undoubtedly a wild ride into extremely online psychosis. Whether it coheres into a great modern western is another question - but maybe coherence is no longer an option?