Writer/director Ari Aster has now spent his last two films explaining himself. One of the most divisive sequences in “Beau is Afraid” (2023) saw Joaquin Phoenix’s Beau, in a more meditative part of his uncanny adventure, stand up and exclaim that a play he was seeing was all about him — only for that theory to fall apart at the last minute. Why didn’t all the elements fit? What, then, was the true meaning of all the suffering he’d endured on this earth? Ultimately, the bewildered Beau misses the actual clues as to the true conspiracy shaping his destiny: an obscure pharmaceutical company had been secretly using him for years. The film seemed a reaction to hardcore Aster/A24 fans determined to approach the director’s work like a series of puzzles to be solved, rather than gripping portraits of damaged psyches. A less paranoid, more general interpretation is that “Beau is Afraid” shines a light on our general propensity to disbelieve what we see — a crippling fear of the truth that can quickly curdle into panic and insanity. READ MORE: Cannes 2025 Most Anticipated Films: ‘Sentimental Value,’ ‘Eddington,’ ‘Die My Love’

“Beau is Afraid,” however, was still a UFO, a hilariously arch and cryptic epic set in a parodic version of our world. Its parallels to actual reality only sporadically broke through its bizarre surface, Aster delighting instead in letting those human weaknesses he diagnosed carry his mystified protagonist down the wildest narrative paths imaginable. By contrast, “Eddington,” premiering in Competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, is a shockingly direct variation on that same theme. Rather than exaggerate the absurdity of our reality, Aster makes his point here by setting his story in an already maniacal and surreal context: that of America in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

All justifiable worry that this closer relationship to facts might reduce Aster’s sense of humor to obvious and tired SNL-lite gags quickly dissipates. Although the many attitudes and anxieties Aster identifies within the small New Mexico town of the title are exceedingly familiar, these references are not perverse, nostalgic callbacks (though “Eddington” would genuinely be a valuable record of the pandemic years for historians or visiting aliens a hundred years from now). Basing his humor on the real-world events of a deadly pandemic, Aster walks a very dangerous tightrope. At each mention of a recognizable reality — hydroxychloroquine, California governor Gavin Newsom, or Donald Trump himself, to name just a few — he risks slipping into unsavory irony, or boring cataloguing. Observing him recreating this bizarre event we lived through while subtly critiquing the despicable human instincts it brought to light is thrilling in itself.  

It is through Joaquin Phoenix’s bumbling Sevilla County sheriff Joe Cross that Aster makes all of these elements gel into a cohesive (if not coherent) reality. Introduced in his first scene as one of those people who see mask mandates as human rights violations, Joe ambles through his life, taking things one day at a time. A purely reactive being (it is clear that he finds masks annoying), he is not a conspiracist — unlike his wife’s mother, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), who lives with the couple and complements the film’s dynamic sound design with a near-constant commentary of angry paranoid thoughts whenever she is around. No one pays any attention to her ramblings, and like all of the very many references to the pandemic in the film, she contributes to a general atmosphere of inane mental clutter. Journalists on TV, YouTubers on laptops, newspaper headlines and radio reports are full of big words that, to Joe, are little more than ambient noise. 

He is the complete opposite of his arch enemy, current mayor Ted Garcia (Pablo Pascal). A reasonable man when it comes to containment measures, Garcia is seeking re-election on an agenda that includes the construction of a job-providing, water-resources-depleting data centre in the area. Like the pharmaceutical company in “Beau”, this project looms over the film, with Aster once again subtly nodding towards the corporate interests that truly control our destinies.

But if Beau was afraid, Joe is stupid. He does not pay attention to these developments, and when he suddenly decides to run for mayor, it is for personal reasons only. In Joe’s crosshairs for reprimanding the sheriff’s cavalier attitude to the virus, Garcia once dated Lou (Emma Stone), Joe’s wife, who is recovering from some kind of mental breakdown. In fact, and as though Joe did not have enough enemies already, Lou also secretly resents him for not “asking questions” or “doing his own research.” As he did in “Beau”, Aster acerbically highlights the hysterical hollowness of idioms and trendy phrases.

Eddington is a town where no one says what they really mean or acts for the reasons they claim. Doesn’t that sound familiar? The conspiracists are mentally ill, the idealistic politicians want money, the sheriff is mildly inconvenienced — and the young BLM activists simply want a girl. The most delicate and daring aspect of the film’s multilayered storyline is the explicit mention of the murder of George Floyd, with the staging of a protest in reaction within the town itself. Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), the young woman leading the protest, is not spared Aster’s eye for the limitations of ready-made chants and phrases. But when she shouts against oppression and adds that, as a white person, she should not even be talking right now, she at least has more self-awareness than the adults present. Aster seems to empathize with the frustration of young people who would rather participate in potentially useless protests than do nothing at all. Even so, he does not deny just how easily the language of liberation can be turned into empty posturing. Local teenagers Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) and Brian (Cameron Mann) quickly learn to parrot Sarah’s liberation language when competing for her affection. 

The moment when this world of petty grievances and growing instability suddenly turns into one of crime and violence marks a clear shift in the film, but it is an escalation to be expected from Aster, whose previous films have all ended on a crescendo. It’s a progression that also brings “Eddington” ever closer to the pitch-dark comedy and bloody atmosphere of a Jim Thompson novel hinted at from the start. Set in a town about to elect its mayor, and centred on a dopey and resentful sheriff who is ignored by his wife and frequently humiliated in public, “Eddington” recalls the plot of Thompson’s masterpiece Pop. 1280. 

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The fact that Joe, as similar as he is to the anti-hero of Thompson’s novel, has none of his psychopathic intelligence, could be Aster’s most hilarious blow against a violent country whose people are blinded by their neuroses. More conventional than any of Aster’s previous work, “Eddington” is also more rigorous and explicit in its political engagement — the work of a maturing filmmaker eager to make it clear that his dark and scathing sense of humor is anything but an empty provocation. [A]

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