Watching Eddington is like being trapped inside a broken algorithm. It’s loud, messy, uncomfortable—and somehow, it all feels too familiar.
Ari Aster’s latest doesn’t hold your hand. It throws you into a screaming whirlpool of pandemic chaos, YouTube rabbit holes, and political flame wars. The film opens with an unhoused man ranting to himself, and weirdly, that’s the most grounded moment you’ll get for a while.
From there, things spiral. Fast.
What’s Actually Happening in This Movie?
The plot, if you can call it that, centers on a small fictional town in New Mexico during May 2020. Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross, a mild-mannered sheriff who gets annoyed about being asked to wear a mask in the desert. One minute he’s watching YouTube videos about fatherhood, and the next he’s locked in an ideological war with Pedro Pascal’s character, Mayor Ted Garcia.
The pandemic is just the starting point. The town explodes into an absurd battle of misinformation, trauma, performative activism, and very real violence. People spiral. Conspiracy theories fly. Everyone loses it.
The teenage girl screaming “Join the movement!” at a Black police officer. The wife, played by Emma Stone, quietly collapsing into culty internet forums. The deputy turning on his partner over one suspicious comment. A woman who’s been watching too many TikToks declares the town’s drinking water is poisoned—then someone spikes the actual water supply just to prove a point.
It’s chaos in slow motion. And the more it unfolds, the more you start to feel it in your bones.
Is Ari Aster Trying to Break Our Brains on Purpose?
That’s the question everyone’s asking.
Because Eddington doesn’t care if you “get it.” In fact, that might be the joke. Every character is a caricature. Every take is extreme. No one escapes the madness, and there’s no wise voice of reason trying to steer the ship.
Joaquin’s Joe starts as the “reasonable guy,” the one just asking questions. But by the end, he’s deep in his own pit of denial, desperation, and self-righteous rage. His feud with Pascal’s mayor gets tangled up in old jealousy and new scandal. Their past, tied to Joe’s wife Louise, gets turned into a public PR disaster that feels both absurd and weirdly believable.
Aster throws so much into the blender: racism, police brutality, influencer culture, mommy blogs, right-wing grifters, leftist slogans, mental health breakdowns, grooming allegations, and mass delusion. He’s not choosing sides. He’s just letting it all combust.
There are moments of genius, no doubt. Scenes that hold so much tension you forget to breathe. Moments of dark comedy that make you laugh then immediately feel wrong about it.
But when the credits roll, you’re mostly left with a buzzing headache. Like you’ve stared too long into the internet and it stared back. Not with answers, just more noise.
Eddington might become a cult classic for people who find comfort in seeing the absurdity of our times reflected back at them. Or maybe it’ll be remembered as the movie that showed us we weren’t ready to laugh at 2020 just yet. Either way, it leaves a mark. Whether you wanted it or not.