Eddington (2025)

Ari Aster's Eddington arrives in May of 2020, when a pandemic and a protest movement collide in a fictional New Mexico town, and it proceeds to treat both with the enthusiasm of a man sorting receipts. The George Floyd protests are not decoration here; they are the weather. Teenagers march, a social justice influencer named Sarah collects suitors the way other people collect stamps, and the sheriff's race turns on who can weaponize the moment faster. The film's posture toward all of this is sneering, which some critics found repellent and others found bracing. Sneering is still engagement. A Black deputy and a Pueblo officer named Butterfly Jimenez, the only investigator in the county with a functioning brain, move through the story without a speech attached to them. They simply work there.

The load-bearing idea is money. A data center is coming to Eddington, and Aster has said plainly that the film is about big tech and capital seizing everything while the citizenry argues about masks. The developers may have arranged the whole catastrophe. That is a thesis, and the film commits to it with a straight face, which is more than can be said for its treatment of gender. Louise denies her husband's accusations on camera and leaves town, an act of agency that the movie observes without much interest. Sarah exists to be desired and mocked.

The film is a sermon without a congregation. It insists that misinformation and distraction have hollowed out democracy, and it never stops insisting. There is no LGBTQ content, no environmental concern, no body-positive gesture, and mental illness appears only as decay. Aster invents his town entirely, so there is no history to revise. The result is a long, sour, frequently gripping provocation that knows exactly what is wrong with everyone and declines to say what should be done. John Waters called it the best film of the year. That tracks.