Eddington (2025) : Hats off to Aster for making something that feels like screaming into the void, and having the void laugh back.

 

The only thing more bonkers than living through 2020 might be watching Ari Aster try to make sense of it all — and somehow pulling it off. Eddington is weird, sharp, chaotic, and more grounded than you'd expect from the man who gave us hereditary trauma and commune horror. This time, he’s tackling a different kind of nightmare: America in a pandemic haze, armed with bad Wi-Fi, conspiracy podcasts, and Nextdoor threads from hell.

Props to Aster for taking on such a messy, thorny part of history and doing it in a way that’s both empathetic and unhinged. The first half especially crackles with tension and absurdity, showing the slow leak of civility and collective sanity in a small New Mexico town. Every character feels like they were ripped straight from some viral tweet you regret reading at 3 a.m. Everyone thinks they’re the only sane person in the room. Spoiler: no one is.

The movie captures that “somebody's got to do something!” panic of the early lockdown days — when your uncle was posting 4chan memes and your yoga teacher was suddenly a virology expert. It doesn't pick a political side, but it absolutely skewers the rot at the top, especially the shiny liberal elites who told everyone to “stay calm” while cashing in and tuning out.

The final act is unfiltered chaos — it goes full Aster. Think fires, betrayals, tinfoil hats, and a surreal montage that might be the best argument ever for logging off permanently. It’s not a perfect film, and some of the meme-y COVID stuff feels a bit obvious, but the ambition here is admirable.

This might be the closest we get to a Coen Brothers film about the pandemic if the Coens were a little meaner and had a penchant for existential dread. Gorgeously shot, sharply acted, and funnier than it has any right to be, Eddington is a messy, manic portrait of a country gone rogue.