An original voice of the new generation of filmmakers, the thirty-nine year old from Santa Fe still stumbles. Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone are not enough…
Ari Asterbut what’s happening? Surprising and unconventional voice of the new generation of filmmakers, innovator of the horror genre, the thirty-nine year old from Santa Fe still stumbles. Eddington (from 17 October at the cinema), which marked its entry into the Cannes Olympus, leaves you tired and bored. From the pandemic to conspiracy theories, from white supremacy to the raging of social media, many issues have been addressed, often in an unruly manner. So much chaos, so much boredom.
A super cast is not enough
Yet the cast of Eddington it is that of great occasions. Ari Aster hires again Joaquin Phoenixafter wanting it in Beau is scared (2023), his first slip after the success of Hereditary – The roots of evil And Midsommar – Village of the Damnedrefined and original horror films.
He is the sheriff of Eddington, a dusty imaginary town in New Mexico, in the American southwest. A little awkward, tormented, he is obsessed with his wife, with whom he struggles to get in touch, closed as she is in her own world of pain, tested in sanity. And here it is Emma Stone! To soothe her wounds a little there is an online guru, who offers his followers a performance of comfort and consolation (no less than Austin Butler).
The sheriff’s rival, on the other hand, has the frank and healthy face of Pedro Pascalwho plays the confident, progressive mayor of Eddington, at the end of his term and ready to run for a new office. And here it is, the fuse that will lead to the collision: Joaquin Phoenix’s sheriff also wants to run for mayor and goes on the electoral campaign and. There is a thorny relationship between the two, due to a great murky doubt about the past. And the police chief is convinced of its truth.
Eddington, so ambitious and scattered
The summer 2020 of the Covid pandemic is the backdrop to all this. Indeed, the hysteria of assumptions, fears and conspiracy suspicions generated by the Coronavirus is full protagonist. It floods the 2 hours and 28 minutes of film with his drunken confusion. But its specter is so close and recent, and has filled our minds so much in recent years, that it does not diminish the interest.
Ari Aster challenges the boundaries of genres, mixing dark comedy, western, thriller and splatter. But now it’s didactic, now it gets carried away, losing control of the narrative. Rare are the moments in which, as spectators, we feel fully and convincingly inside the story.
Al Cannes Film Festival 2025where Eddington was in the running for the Palme d’Or, came away without any awards.
When success had not yet embraced him, Ari Aster knew how to be provocative and burning, in slow and engaging crescendos of tension. The feeling is that now, with budget and creative freedom at his disposal, he gets lost in a lot of projects ambitious and dispersive which he cannot channel.
A western where the guns are cell phones
“We all know that we live in our own echo chambers because we are trapped in a feedback-based system», said Aster. «The problem is that people don’t remember knowing this. Eddington It’s about what happens when the feedback balloons and bubbles collide.”
First the pandemic hit, then there was the horrible murder of George Floyd. Aster wrote Eddington to use that confluence of events and try to make sense of what was happening.
A flow of news, personal experiences, conspiracy theories and misinformation has moved from the internet. Aster saw something in that flow, in the role that technology has in manipulating and dividing us: «Eddington it’s a western, but the guns are telephones”, his words.
Enter the Black Lives Matter movement, the dangerous allegations of QAnon, pedophilia, Antifa terrorism, American Indians, an exhausting carousel of mystification of the truth. The fears of our era, of course. But a lot, too much, without incisiveness.
A curiosity? Eddington found its locations mostly in Truth or Consequencesa very cinematic town in New Mexico, with beautiful surrounding views, and a singular name which translated means “truth or consequences”. In 1950 the inhabitants, through a referendum, chose to change the name of the town from Hot Springs to that of a very popular show of those years.
