Writer-producer-director Ari Aster’s new A24 film has left audiences divided. It’s very much of him to evoke that type of response, given the nature of his film catalog, dating back to his viral graduate school short film, The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, in 2011. Since then, he’s tried to maintain that tone with several short films and then onto a few feature titles. Yet, these attempts to keep up relevance in Hollywood have started to show their cracks. His fourth feature, Eddington, further strays away from what is categorically considered horror.
Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar defined his approach to horror filmmaking through the production crews he has worked with. Those two particular films even elicited phenomenal performances from both Toni Collette (Mickey 17) and Florence Pugh (Thunderbolts*). However, succeeding them with the psychological surrealist dark comedy, Beau Is Afraid, is rough as Hell. This meant assembling an almost three-hour-long acid trip and thus treating it as if it were an epic. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a solid film, but people live in a time wherein attention spans are shrinking.
Still, Eddington contains that Aster touch, and doesn’t stray too far from its roots. Explicitly, its narrative occurs at a time that so few hope to revisit: the Coronavirus pandemic of 2019 (COVID-19). The film runs around the same length as Midsommar, but its traditional three-act structure is closer to Beau Is Afraid. Ultimately, Eddington is Aster’s deviation from his usual genre storytelling, but forces an inauthentic political statement on the cultural climate of the United States.
Trigger Warning: This film features instances of police brutality, hate crimes, and other modern Western aspects.
Eddington as a Filmmaking Feat
Production-wise, this A24 title is a great accomplishment in capturing a neo-Western atmosphere for the sake of cinema. In terms of the soundtrack, music composers The Haxan Cloak (as Bobby Krlic) and Daniel Pemberton score a decent Western. Their instrumentals either showcase honor to cover up Eddington Sheriff Joe Cross’s failure to enforce the law to his liking, highlight suspicion with drum beats, increase anxiety in dire situations, or be overall epic.
There are some good tracks from music supervisor Jillian Ennis, but they’re not enough to bring this film anywhere near excellence. The sound design of graffiti paint spraying as a car drives through a road with headlights on at night is one of the better details that I enjoy. Conversely, the ADR shot of Deputy Sheriff Michael Cooke (Micheal Ward) initially falling victim to the conflict rubs me the wrong way.
Costume designer Anna Terrazas’s outfits range from the haggard, sickly drifter in Lodge (Clifton Collins Jr.) to the outgoing appearance of Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), with his cozy gray dress shirt and brown sleeveless zip-up vest. Even Cross’s wife, Louise (Emma Stone), looks deprived of life with her long red hair and no-makeup-on countenance.
A Place in Purgatory
Production designer Elliott Hostetter crafts brilliant set pieces in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. The vistas it offers are pleasing to the eyes, while the shuttered restaurant-turned-Gunther’s Gun Store and the abandoned building-turned-Sheriff’s Office are grave in structure. Mayor Garcia’s Bar is a small space that gives off a good saloon impression. Moreover, the Cross residence and the Garcia estate are distinct in presentation. The former comes across as the type of home that could almost be harmonious with the Graham residence from Hereditary. Louise’s homemade dolls look creepy, including the white doll head inside the mouth of a larger, sombrero-wearing head. Meanwhile, the latter has surreal exteriors and interiors, a hallmark feature of Aster’s filmography.
Facets of Falsity
Director of photography Darius Khondji’s camera work and editor Lucian Johnston’s cuts are solid, working hand-in-hand to transition from night instantly to daytime. Khondji also frames characters magnificently, such as the stand-off between Cross and Garcia standing at adjacent corners of sidewalks; Louise sitting at a backporch table looking over her husband’s shoulder—at a doorway—as “pied piper” cult leader, Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), looks around the Crosses’ living room; the moving shots of Cross passing through a masked crowd to shut off a party’s music and then walking back to his cop car; and Deputy Cooke in a perforated hole of a gun range target paper.
The camera’s close-ups of Cross’s face are the harshest I have seen from Khondji in some years. These are inverted astonishingly through first-person point-of-view via Cross’s eyes. The overhead shots cut together—as a dead body is disposed of—is the first cruel change in Aster’s tone. This juxtaposes splendidly with a drone shot of Sheriff Cross and his deputies on a rocky field. In turn, that leads to an explosive catalyst for the final act. Eddington‘s production elements culminate in its most grandiose action sequence—a 360° movement of Cross wielding a rifle in a Call of Duty-like environment. Simultaneously, this sequence is narratively one of the film’s worst.
The Film’s Themes
Obviously, for a film that utilizes COVID at its peak as a major backdrop, misinformation comprises the narrative’s prominent layer. YouTube videos and random news articles centered on conspiracy theories and lies, e.g., hydroxychloroquine, the staging of the Titanic sinking, and the promise of Bitcoin’s prolific quality. What once started as a flaw on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook has now spread to multiple social media spheres. The outcome is a preventable albeit bleak cacophony of hostility on all ends of the political spectrum.
Through cell phone cameras, closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage, and drone perspectives, the paranoia of the Panopticon is another prominent layer found in Eddington. It reaches a point where divisiveness becomes a by-product in a surveillance state. As a result, perception is fragmented and the truth is doctored amongst the small town’s population. However, I cannot help but believe that this theme of surveillance—along with the neo-Western approach to the whole narrative—is executed better in Jordan Peele’s NOPE an entire three summers ago. Eddington also involves commentary on capitalism, but that tends to take a backseat in the overall conflict.
The (Current) Problem with Ari Aster as a Storyteller
Rhetorically speaking, many people feel that any narrative platform in relation to the pandemic is just poor timing. Steven Soderbergh and Scott Z. Burns’ dramatic thriller, Contagion, is acceptable because of the very fact that it was ahead of its time. It presented a warning that accurately displays how the world at large would treat a pervasive pandemic. By comparison, Eddington is an example of distasteful kairos, even if released a half-decade after the lockdown. It’s as bad as watching Alex Garland’s Civil War. Then again, at least Aster’s film contains some reasoning.
Cross’s actions are flat-out horrid, and to my chagrin, I easily find his movements in the final act reflective of, say, Kyle Rittenhouse, who crossed state lines from Illinois to Wisconsin to shoot three men (and mortally ending two’s lives). More recently, and more eerily for that matter, is the “politically motivated assassination” of Democratic Minneapolis lawmakers in the space of their own home.
The historical fictionalization of May 2020 only minimizes whatever ethos this A24 film would have had by bastardizing itself with blatant and antagonizing mentions of Wuhan, China, and “Antifa” and develops threads based on the murder of George Floyd and the existence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Aster leans toward the right despite claiming a centrist viewpoint, and where Cross’s mask remains absent, Aster’s mask is off as well.
Final Thoughts on Eddington
We can never go back; we can only go better.
Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal)
Ari Aster knows how to push people’s buttons, and Eddington is but another one of his works wherein this happens. Sure, it’s darkly comical, from Cross waiting in line outside a supermarket by a Ted Garcia Re-election banner to him asserting dominance over Garcia in this scene and that, to the Katy Perry needle drop, to the satirical black-and-white re-election commercial, Cross speaking foolishly into a microphone across town, and on and on. Collaborating with Joaquin Phoenix a second time suggests to me that this could have just been a Beau Is Afraid sequel, with the final act of Cross’s spiral resembling the 2023 film’s narrative.
There are a myriad things that can go wrong in Eddington, and Aster deliberately chooses the worst beats. I understand that it’s all satire, but it reaches almost unfathomable extremes. Suffice it to say, this film is as triggering as Cross’s falling down from his high horse. The filmmaker rips off a years-old band-aid that clings onto bits of flesh at the tips of his fingers.
Ari Aster’s Eddington is now playing in theaters.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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