In Ari Aster’s ambitious 2023 flop, Beau Is Afraid, the filmmaker transmuted his feverish, anxiety-choked psyche into a hellscape of constant external threats. Beau, played hapless and pitiable by Joaquin Phoenix, can’t go five minutes without dodging violent street punks, or fielding calls from his emotionally abusive mother, or narrowly escaping gunfire. All the commotion and brutality complicate an otherwise mundane task: visiting Mom for the weekend.
After critical and commercial smash hits, 2018’s Hereditary and 2019’s Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid was Aster’s ostensible blank check movie—a rare rite handed to directors that make a studio so much dough, they are let off leash as a reward. The three-hour “nightmare comedy,” as Aster coined it, cost A24 $35 million—more than his first two movies combined. It brought in only $10 million at the box office, dividing viewers without creating a brouhaha big enough to drive ticket sales. But A24 wasn’t spooked by Aster’s sole fumble. Or maybe, they’d already inked the deal on his fourth picture, Eddington, a paranoid, Covid-era western, that expands the model of Beau Is Afraid. Instead of merely letting the dread of one character ravage the world around him, Aster bottles the collective fear of a nation—a planet—and lets it poison a flawed sheriff and his sleepy New Mexico town.
We meet Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) loafing in his patrol car on the border between his territory of Eddington and Pueblo, a neighboring Native American sovereignty. As a Pueblo squad car pulls up alongside Joe, the tension crackles: a squabble about jurisdiction, a command for Joe to respect the mask mandate. It’s late May 2020, and asthmatic Joe isn’t about to constrict his breath for a virus that hasn’t even hit his town—so he insists.
Joe is willfully ignorant—to national news and a lethal pandemic—but Aster didn’t write the character as a one-dimensional MAGA standee. Phoenix assumes a pathetic and quietly arrogant demeanor as Joe, who speaks in a squeaky, exasperated cadence. Joe is also complicated and prone to taking the worst action to do the “right” thing. He dotes upon wife Louise (Emma Stone), a haunted Victorian doll of a woman, who has suffered some obscured trauma and is trapped at home with her live-in, conspiracy theory-spouting mother (Deirdre O’Connell). He has a mysterious, long-running feud with Eddington’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is mounting a reelection campaign. One day, after defending an elderly man who refuses to wear a mask to buy groceries, Joe decides to combat Ted and his CDC-compliant regime: He’s running for mayor, too.
Conspiracy and misinformation flit around Eddington like horse flies. The hubbub emanates from radios, television sets, and smartphones, the latter of which Aster presents in a manner I haven’t quite seen onscreen before. He and cinematographer Darius Khondji frame entire shots with the phone in mind, treating it as a compositional element rather than an ugly but undying appendage of modern life. There are no quick cuts around a cellphone or enlarged text bubbles popping up by characters’ heads. Aster lets us linger on the phone screen, lending it and the surrounding world equal weight. Aster and Khondji even manage the unthinkable: a beautiful shot of an iPhone on a ring light mount. As Joe stumbles through a campaign speech in a local restaurant, we don’t watch him directly, but through the small, rectangular device illuminated by a halo of light. The real world around it is a complete blur.
Paranoia and hatred nourish Joe like vital nutrients, and their potency only grows throughout Eddington. As Joe carries out his mayoral campaign—bolstered by fearmongering (and misspelled) slogans like “Your Being Manipulated”—his dusty hamlet becomes a microcosm for the conflicts rattling 2020 America at large. QAnon fabrications color the rants of online conspiracy theorist Vernon Peak (Austin Butler), who is pulling Joe’s wife into his orbit. Plans for a sprawling A.I. data center divide Ted Garcia’s Big Tech backers and residents who fear its ecological side effects, a conflict that oddly aligns an environmentalist with Joe Cross’ campaign. Aster is constantly muddying his characters with contradictory views and selfish motives, so that no one’s hands are entirely clean.
As Joe and Ted’s rivalry grows more fraught and petty, news of George Floyd’s murder mobilizes a small but enraged band of local protestors, some of whom have self-serving intentions. A white teenage boy named Brian (Cameron Mann) hastily brushes up on racial justice CliffNotes to impress a white teenage girl named Sarah (Amèlie Hoeferle), who Aster has written as the personification of performative allyship and white fragility. During a BLM protest on Eddington streets, Sarah angrily confronts her ex-boyfriend Michael (Michael Ward), a deputy sheriff who is one of the only Black people in town. “You should be protesting with us!” she shouts, inches away from his face. Before the protest, Michael spent his day getting constant pleas from his white colleagues to explain how he felt about the George Floyd tragedy.
It’s disorienting, or even debilitating, for a movie to thrust us back into a period we are still crawling out of. It’s like rebreaking a bone that never fully healed. “We haven’t metabolized what happened in 2020,” Aster recently told Slant Magazine. “We’re still living it. We’re out of lockdown, but whatever process began there, we’re still in it.” Aster began writing the script for Eddington during the same months it transpires, before he paused to work on Beau Is Afraid. That both films are fueled by paranoia is no coincidence. The pandemic made us fear fellow humans on the most basic, biological level: Proximity to another body will harm me. That anxiety metastasized into an existential terror, as political rhetoric became another kind of highly transmissible, airborne virus.
Aster expresses this surging cross-contamination by splicing in references to the many plagues of 2020: Donald Trump, cryptocurrency, Covid-hoarding, pedophilia rings, the media’s portrayal of Antifa. His method is frenzied, often absurdly humorous. But one of my favorite manifestations of this cacophony is Deirdre O’Connell’s performance of Joe’s mother-in-law, Dawn. Her dialogue is constant and frequently overlaps with Joe’s as he tries to communicate with Louise. In one scene, he stands at an open sliding glass door, trying to console his wife. Dawn rambles on, issuing crackpot theories in the background. Visually, she appears in shadow behind Joe, a specter beyond the lace curtain. Dawn is an oracle of disinformation throughout Eddington—a network of fear made corporeal.
Dawn might be the most distilled embodiment of Covid-era panic, but every character eventually turns their interpersonal issues into a kind of political performance. Brian, who stumbled into the BLM movement to impress a girl, winds up at the center of a media frenzy. Ted’s son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) sends a makeout selfie to his friend, and it becomes incriminating evidence in accusing an innocent man of murder. Joe launches his campaign on a platform of neighborly trust and personal freedom, and bloodies his hands with smear tactics and violence.
That Joe ultimately embarks on a violent rampage seems inevitable. The gunfire, the bloodshed, and the body count are brutal, but never surprising. There is a dullness that seems very intentional, an echo of the ambient carnage that is on constant rotation in the U.S. During my screening, as a character is abruptly shot through the chest, a man in the back row laughed, possibly out of discomfort—or simply desensitization. A woman whipped around and swiftly chastised him: “Why are you laughing?! Jesus,” she hissed. It was another microcosm of a nonconsensual reality, made manifest in the movie theater.
“Evil is sentimental,” one character tells Joe halfway through the film. Human behavior has far less virtue. Aster understands that our greater political atmosphere invades the far reaches of our psyche, often undetected, like the ingestion of so many microplastics. So too does the motive of one person radiate outward, rippling in a space of sociopolitical relevance. Anyone is capable of anything, Aster posits. Those who deny that potential are the greatest threats.