Eddington

Eddington struck me as an engaging, unsettling, and very uneven film. It holds your attention because Ari Aster knows how to load the atmosphere, tighten scenes, and create the feeling that everything is about to blow up. He sets it during the COVID-19 era, but not just to use the pandemic as background decoration. What really interests him is the fear, paranoia, conspiracies, and moral tension that ended up poisoning everything.

What works best is the way it portrays a world in which nobody seems to be listening to anybody else. Everything is filtered through phones, rhetoric, suspicion, and the need to be right. The film captures that feeling of collective madness quite well, that warped reality of a society trapped between public performance, private delusion, and constant conflict. That is where it has real bite and real venom.

Joaquin Phoenix once again proves how good he is at playing awkward, twisted, even ridiculous characters without ever becoming uninteresting. Pedro Pascal also brings strong presence, and together they carry a film that sometimes seems determined to sabotage itself. Aster still has a sharp eye for the sickly, the absurd detail, and the kind of tension that never fully settles down.

The problem is that it tries to do too many things at once. Political satire, black comedy, thriller, social portrait, violence, absurdism... and it does not always fit those elements together with the same precision. At times the mix works really well, but at others the film drifts, overindulges itself, and starts to feel excessive. You can tell it has ideas, but not all of them land equally well.

It also does not help that several characters feel more like symbols of a sick society than people with real inner life. That strengthens the larger reading, yes, but it also takes away some emotion. And in such a long film, so full of noise and agitation, you miss a little more humanity beneath all the bitterness and collective hysteria.

Even so, I liked it. I do not think it is a fully achieved work or Ari Aster’s best film, but it does have personality, tension, and a sharp enough view of a period that still feels raw. It is uneven, sometimes too pleased with itself, but also uncomfortable and forceful enough to be worth watching.