Despite a small body of work, American director Ari Aster has established a genre of his own. His debut Hereditary (2018) helped launch the term “elevated horror”, as a domestic tale of family grief segued into an unhinged supernatural horror. Midsommar (2019) fuelled Florence Pugh’s ascent to stardom and made us all very worried about attending Swedish folk festivals. If Beau Is Afraid (2023), an unwieldy update on The Odyssey, proved more difficult for audiences to parse, fear not – armed with the same star in Joaquin Phoenix, Aster has upped the ante with his first film to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and it’s in competition for the prestigious Palme d’Or prize.
Each of the above three films followed emotionally beleaguered heroes subjected to absurd trials amidst lashings of shocking violence. A contemporary western, Eddington turns Aster’s usual preoccupations inside out, so that instead of focusing on the psychological travails of a single unravelling protagonist, the scope is widened to a cross-section of racially diverse inhabitants in a fictional small town (subbed in by New Mexico). By the end of a blood-soaked third act, it’s clear that Eddington is a microcosm of the state of America.
Set in 2020, amid the pandemic and the wave of Black Lives Matter protests that erupted after the police murder of George Floyd, Eddington initially cleaves to Aster’s usual character template. We are plunged into the daily doings of Sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix), an impulsive asthmatic who gets so mad about the state mandate requiring him to wear a mask that he decides to run for mayor against long-standing enemy Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal).
In parallel, Joe is losing his wife Louise (Emma Stone) to the web presence of budding cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak (a sparingly used, scene-stealing Austin Butler). Louise is suffering from a mysterious trauma, doesn’t like to be touched and refers to herself in the third person when stressed. In bouts of wellness, she makes creepy dolls that Joe pays his colleague to buy. Rounding out his household is mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), who relishes nothing more than berating everyone – her voice is often heard off camera while Joe suffers in the foreground.
This is Aster’s funniest film to date, and makes use of an ever expanding and shifting cast to dot the 150-minute runtime with well-observed comic details and visual payoffs. These often riff on the deadpan reactions of the Black and Native American characters to Joe and his meathead deputy. Aster’s enduring preoccupation with the paranoid universes we build in our minds takes on a less sympathetic, more malign aspect when this self-absorption wears a law enforcement badge and carries a rifle.
Digital culture is masterfully seeded as a radicalising force in a kaleidoscope of different directions. The screenplay is as fluent in the language of identity politics as it is slogan-driven electioneering as it is Vernon’s sham guruspeak. Eddington stops shy of sermonising, even as it skewers a range of political postures. A young white man hosting a vigil for a murdered Hispanic man self-flagellates, “My job now is to listen, which I’ll do right after I’ve made this speech which I have no right to make!!!”
The wider screen of a western and the broader scope of a state-of-the-nation suits the overflowing ideas that struggled to be contained within Aster’s more insular works. Right beside him is cinematographer Darius Khondji, whose frames assiduously serve the visual comedy while capturing one hypnotic image after another. Phoenix is predictably good, game and giving and is matched by every performance across the board, big and small.
Micheal Ward stands out as the police officer justifying Joe’s comment that “a third of my department is Black!” (It’s a department of three.) His stoic demeanour is a study in micro-acting and when, after one injustice too many, it slips, it suddenly seems like Eddington is his film. But no, this is an ensemble effort. It has a sweep that shows that the Wild West still exists on the ground and online, and a keen eye for the people that grow in a sandy, mountain-flanked, lonely landscape.
Dir: Ari Aster. Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O’Connell, Micheal Ward, Austin Butler, Emma Stone. Cert TBC, 145 mins
‘Eddington’ is in US cinemas from 18 July, with a UK release yet to be determined
