Eddington

Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal square off in Ari Aster’s brazenly provocative Western thriller set during the pandemic that made America lose its mind…capturing the creeping unreality of what America’s become. The film is set in the desert city of Eddington, New Mexico, during the COVID summer of 2020, and the first indication that it’s going to offer a major tweak of conventional wisdom is that the protagonist, Joe Cross (Phoenix), who’s the city sheriff, is just about the only person in town who refuses to wear a face mask.

Not long into the film, the George Floyd murder occurs and triggers a small local movement of anti-racist youth. The film is unambiguous about portraying them as a pack of deluded narcissists whose conception of themselves exemplifies the very privilege they’re out to overthrow. But the real point is that moralistic self-righteousness has become a kind of addiction in America. Aster is dead serious about dramatizing what he views as the looking glass that America passed through during the pandemic era.

“Excoriating and exhilarating in equal measure, it is the first truly great movie to deal explicitly with the unique madness and malice that the global pandemic revealed.” — Jason Gorber, Paste Magazine