EDDINGTON - Mark Reviews Movies

Eddington, A24

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 18, 2025

The main character of Eddington is a county Sheriff named Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix). We know a few things about him almost immediately upon meeting the man. He adores his wife, since her photo serves as the wallpaper for all of his devices. He doesn't do much work, since a couple of local police officers take the opportunity of pulling up next to his SUV to mention that how little help he is. Even though there's a global pandemic raging in May 2020, Joe doesn't want to wear a face mask, either.

Writer/director Ari Aster's film is neither too soon, because the COVID-19 pandemic created something of a bubble in time that forced us to confront and process it in a peculiar way, nor too late, because we're still dealing with the fallout of paranoia and disinformation or outright misinformation and distrust that emerged or were heightened by those same circumstances. There are still people who believe the disease was phony or overblown or a legitimate catastrophe unleashed by whichever public or secretive organization they want to blame at the moment.

Indeed, there are people who have said or will say each of those contradictory things within a short amount of time, depending on how they're feeling and whom they're hating on a given day. COVID may mostly be finished with us, but we're far from being done with it and what it revealed about the mentality of certain people. Joe exists simultaneously as an amalgamation and a distillation of those attitudes and how quickly one unfortunate thought can spiral into a messy web of the worst ways of thinking.

Everything—and a lot, to put it mildly, happens to and around Joe by the end of this story—begins to spiral out of control because Joe refuses to wear a mask. In retrospect, he might have wished that he did, as opposed to kicking up such a fuss about a paper facial covering in the middle of the outbreak of a highly infectious disease, but if Joe does have such regrets, he's not saying them by the end of the film for reasons that one probably wouldn't believe if they explained right now.

At its core, then, Aster's film isn't so much a political examination or diatribe, a character study, or even a satire about how just about everyone with a political message to push has some ulterior motive, some level of hypocrisy, or someone telling them what to do or say, even without people being aware of that influence. It's those things to one degree or another, for sure, which certainly makes its content a potential firebox of debate and outrage from every imaginable side of our current political schisms. That also makes it a bit of a narrative mess, although that quality is easier to forgive once Aster's real purpose becomes undeniably clear.

Here is a political satire and a neo-noir thriller and an incisive examination of its protagonist that is, with all of that other stuff set aside, a farcical comedy of errors. Such a story might not be the one we anticipate in the early stages of the narrative, which lays it on thick with COVID-era concerns and seems uncertain of where it stands among the characters' various divisions. It is, however, perhaps the story this material and, for sure, its main character deserve once the pieces fall into place.

At first, it's about how Joe won't wear a mask, no matter how many people ask him to and remind him that there's a state-wide mandate to do so in New Mexico. He says it's because his asthma makes breathing difficult with one, and while that may be true, it's neither logical under the circumstances nor his eventual rationale for leading a campaign against the mandate in the eponymous town. No, that's because he likes the attention his stand gets him, which leads him to spontaneously announce his campaign to become the next mayor of Eddington.

His opponent is the current mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who seems a decent and caring guy but does have his own agenda—having to do with a resource-depleting tech facility that a company wants to build nearby. Nobody's especially honest, consistent, or doing good for solely for the sake of it here. That includes our main characters, obviously, but it also extends to a group of local teens who start a local racial justice group. The mayor's son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) and his friend Brian (Cameron Mann) join in order to catch the attention of pretty Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), who mainly seems to be protesting to get some response from Michael (Micheal Ward), a Sheriff's deputy she likes.

Adding more direct levels of conspiracy are Joe's wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her mother Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell). They become obsessed with the charismatic Vernon (Austin Butler), who sees awful abuse and child predators everywhere, and the fact that Dawn draws the line on that specific conspiracy says a lot about her, her deceased husband, and why Louise is so hesitant to start a family like Joe wants to.

Again, all of this is a lot—too much, perhaps, for how simple the plot and comedy of Eddington eventually become. Joe, who put himself in this position, keeps getting knocked down, insulted, belittled, called a liar, and, basically, bearing the brunt of being a petty, self-involved, and power-hungry sort of man. Something has to give for him. Once it does after a particularly humiliating incident with Ted, the plot becomes a fairly straightforward thriller with some nasty murders, as well as enough absurdity to keep reminding us how, well, absurd all of this is on a deeper level. Putting on a mask doesn't seem like such an inconvenience by comparison.

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