Eddington

I don’t think a film has stayed with me like this in years—I’ve already reworked my review three times, still chasing what unsettles me.

Undoubtedly, Aster is at his strongest when he stays grounded: fear, guilt, and resentment simmering in a small town battered by COVID. Masks weren’t tyranny, they were survival, yet the community still cracked. The true horror lies in paranoia and conspiracy corroding trust. A mayoral race weaponises health rules, while George Floyd’s murder and the rise of BLM seep into brittle lives.

The film renders that trauma with force: the unseen threat of infection, the menace of a cough, the loneliness that fractures families. It’s timely, empathetic, and frightening—Aster close to real fear. But then comes the diversion: a fabricated enemy that pulls focus from the sharper nightmare he’d already captured.

From a transatlantic seat, though, the omission glares: how do you revisit COVID politics without Trump or MAGA, the very forces that lit the fire? In their place, caricatures: youths mocked for protesting police brutality, women written off as conspiracists. That isn’t analysis, it’s scorn. And Aster’s habit remains: escalation for its own sake. Each film harsher, stranger, more indulgent. Shock, posed as insight.

Still, it grips. What begins as a piercing study of fear falters into spectacle, yet its unease lingers. Aster may squander truth chasing spectacle, but he has rarely felt more vital.