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Warning: This piece contains major spoilers for the ending of Eddington.
Ari Aster is no stranger to making movies that get people’s attention. His debut feature, Hereditary, and his sophomore effort, Midsommar, were huge successes for distributor A24 and helped spark conversation about “elevated horror.” Aster kept audiences guessing with his wildly ambitious Beau is Afraid, a three-hour comedy-horror starring Joaquin Phoenix that wasn’t successful at the box office, but certainly generated plenty of conversation among those who saw it.
Eddington, his fourth feature, is his most divisive yet. It takes place in May 2020 in the fictional small town of Eddington, New Mexico, as the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic meets the urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement. It follows Joe Cross (Phoenix), Eddington’s sheriff, who lives with his wife, Louise (Emma Stone), and mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), the latter of whom regularly espouses conspiracy theories. Joe, who has asthma, strongly opposes the implementation of mask mandates that Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) is keen to enforce. Furious over the perceived infringement on his and his neighbors’ freedom, Joe decides on a whim to challenge Ted in the upcoming election. Things escalate completely out of control from there.
“The film is about a bunch of people who care about the world and know that something is wrong,” says Aster, who wrote and directed Eddington, of its take on that recent era’s brewing distrust. “They feel very clearly that something is wrong, but they’re all living in different realities, and they disagree about what that thing is that’s wrong.” While the townspeople debate the building of a giant new data center which will bring jobs and industry but drain natural resources, its citizens confront the conflict between police and Black Lives Matter protestors, anger and frustration over masks, and the rampant conspiracy theories increasingly finding a foothold…
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