By: Aaron Mastriani
It’s May 2020 and COVID-19 has struck the New Mexico hamlet of Eddington. Fear is
everywhere. Everyone has different ideas what to do. Old wounds and divisions begin to bubble
to the surface. What happens when they explode?
How does one review Eddington? It tries, and succeeds, at being a great many things. An
epic about a small town. A tale of the craziness of 2020. A story about fear, mental illness, old
scars and wounds. It’s the biggest “New Mexico film” since Oppenheimer. Is it totally successful,
though?
Well, yes.
And no.
The first two thirds of Eddington is the best film of 2025. It captures those times
perfectly. Small town life and small town rivalries thrown into chaos by Covid, Black Lives
Matter, Me Too, human trafficking. Nobody is all right or all wrong. No one is all evil and NO
ONE is perfect. Confusion and self-righteousness are everywhere. Ari Aster weaves his tale with
refreshing partiality to everybody; everyone has something to make fun of. The anti-vaxxers,
conspiracy nuts, and cultists see the “less informed” as fools and murderers and worse. The lily-
white Black Lives Matters protesters would put on halos and drag crosses behind themselves if
they had any. Everybody feels very strongly about everything, and everyone takes themselves
VERY seriously. Normal people in abnormal times, trying to find the answers to very REAL
problems. And sometimes those people snap.
The first two thirds of Eddington absolutely NAILS those times. Grimly hilarious and
incredibly tense, like if the Coen Brothers made a movie with Roman Polanski. Joaquin Phoenix
(doing some of his best work), Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Michael Ward, and Luke Grimes
stand out in the outstanding cast. But whether they are big stars like Austin Butler, or local New
Mexico actors (and there are MANY of them in this film!), they all feel like people instead of
characters. Not demographics or stereotypes, but real PEOPLE. It’s very difficult to make a
movie like this and not have it end up like a soapbox movie (bad) or a sermon (worse). Ari Aster
handles that tightrope perfectly. He just tells his story.
Until…
And then…
In swoops a deus ex machina.
Only here it’s a Gulfstream.
And then there’s the dumpster fire.
To elaborate further would be to ruin the final insane section of Eddington. It’s not BAD,
per se; it just feels like a completely different film. The first two thirds were reality with healthy
doses of sympathy, dark humor, and irreverence. Good people sometimes do horrible things.
But after the dumpster fire scene, the film just goes to Wacky Town (as my improv teacher
Melissa might put it). It feels like Ari Aster wrote himself to a mountaintop (instead of a hole),
and then just decided to PLAY with the film, exploding the mountain like a volcano. Bugs Bunny
tormenting Daffy Duck from the animator’s desk in Duck Amuck comes to mind. In this section
of the film Aster ratchets up the tension to eleven and throws the reality that made the rest of
the film so good out the window. All those issues from the first part of the film swirl into a
surreal hurricane. Don’t get me wrong. This hurricane is sometimes funny and often
entertaining. It just doesn’t match.
I liked Eddington much more this time around than when I saw it with friends when it
opened. Who knows, maybe I’ll like it even more the next time I watch it! Truth be told, I
haven’t yet seen any of Aster’s other films. My friends who are fans tell me that the rest of his
work kind of follows the above pattern.
Will Eddington join other films in my NM Film Hall of Fame like Oppenheimer, No
Country for Old Men, Silverado, The Cowboys, and Hell or High Water? Not quite. Visually the
film is a love letter to New Mexico, and Truth or Consequences practically becomes another
character in the film. Maybe Eddington was just a little TOO surreal for me. We’ll see what
future times hold for this strange and funny film.
