Eddington

There is a specific brand of madness that only sets in when you’re trapped in a small town with nothing but a badge, a grudge, and a mandatory six-foot radius. We’ve had a few years to process the chaotic spring of 2020, but leave it to Ari Aster—the man who made hereditary trauma and Swedish midsummer cults look like a lark—to turn that collective fever dream into a neon-drenched, dust-caked Western. Eddington arrived in 2025 with the kind of "prestige flop" energy that usually signals a future cult classic, and honestly, watching it now, I’m convinced the world just wasn't ready to laugh at how ugly we all got back then.

I actually watched this for the first time on a Sunday afternoon while trying to ignore the fact that my neighbor was power-washing his driveway for the fourth time that week. The rhythmic thrum of his machine provided a weirdly perfect percussive score to the escalating hostility on screen. It turns out, small-town petty politics and global anxiety make for a very potent, very sweaty cocktail.

A Duel at High Noon (and Six Feet Apart)

The setup is deceptively simple: Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is a small-town sheriff in Eddington, New Mexico, who finds himself locked in a psychological—and eventually literal—war with the local mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). It’s May 2020. The world is ending, or maybe it’s just changing, but in Eddington, the "powder keg" isn't some grand philosophical debate. It’s a neighbor-against-neighbor scrap over who gets to hold the power when the rules disappear.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe with a twitchy, high-strung desperation that reminded me of a tea kettle about to whistle. He’s a man who views his badge as the only thing keeping the literal apocalypse at bay. Opposite him, Pedro Pascal is effortlessly charismatic and deeply punchable as the mayor. Their chemistry is less "law and order" and more "two cats tied together in a burlap sack." Watching them trade barbs while trying to maintain some semblance of civic duty is where the comedy shines—it’s the kind of cringe-heavy, dark humor that makes you want to hide behind a pillow.

The A24 Gloss on a Dusty Lens

Visually, the film is a knockout, which shouldn't surprise anyone given that Darius Khondji (the eye behind Uncut Gems and Seven) is behind the camera. He captures New Mexico not as a postcard, but as a claustrophobic trap. The sun feels heavy. The shadows are long and jagged. It’s a Western, sure, but it’s shot like a horror movie where the monster is just your neighbor’s bad attitude.

Emma Stone pops up as Louise Cross, Joe’s wife, and she’s the secret weapon here. While the men are busy measuring their egos, she provides a grounded, albeit increasingly frazzled, perspective on the insanity. There’s a scene involving a botched supply run that Emma Stone carries with a mix of physical comedy and genuine pathos that nearly stole the whole movie for me.

Despite the $25 million budget and the A-list roster, Eddington barely cleared $13 million at the box office. Why? Maybe it’s the runtime—148 minutes is a lot of time to spend in a town this miserable—or maybe audiences in 2025 were still a bit too sensitive about the "Hindsight is 2020" of it all. Ari Aster essentially made a movie about the precise moment the American social contract shredded itself, and he did it with a laugh track made of broken glass.

Why This One Slipped Through the Cracks

It’s rare to see a film this ambitious, with this much star power, just… vanish. Part of the problem was the marketing. The trailers sold it as a straight-ahead crime thriller, but the actual experience is much more of an absurdist dark comedy. It’s High Noon directed by someone who thinks the human race is a cosmic joke.

Turns out, Ari Aster had been sitting on this script for years—long before his success with Hereditary or Midsommar. It was his "dream project," which usually means it’s going to be too weird for the general public and just right for those of us who like our cinema a little bit unhinged. There’s a frantic energy to the editing and a score by Daniel Pemberton that feels like a panic attack played on a banjo. It’s brilliant, but I can see why a family looking for a fun night out at the multiplex might have walked out feeling like they’d just been yelled at for two hours.

The film's failure to find an audience is a classic case of a director's vision being "too much" for the theatrical landscape of the mid-2020s, where franchise fatigue was being replaced by a desperate need for comfort. Eddington is the opposite of comfort. It’s a cactus in movie form.

Eddington is a fascinating, bloated, hilarious wreck of a movie that captures a very specific moment in our history better than any documentary ever could. It’s not always "fun" in the traditional sense, but the performances from Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal are worth the price of admission alone. It’s a film that demands you look at the worst versions of ourselves and find something to chuckle at. If you’ve ever wanted to see a Western where the tumbleweeds are replaced by discarded surgical masks, this is your holy grail. Seek it out, but maybe keep your distance—old habits die hard.