Somebody had to make the first high-profile, award-bait movie about 2020. Appropriately, it was Ari Aster, best known for his work in the horror genre (Hereditary, Midsommar).

Think of it this way: We could have gotten another Crash, only with everybody wearing masks. No doubt we will eventually see a batch of preachy pandemic dramas, and they will win many Oscars. But meanwhile, we have Eddington.

Word to the wise: Walk-outs happened at the screening I attended. If Pedro Pascal is your main draw to this movie, consider Materialists instead.

The deal

It’s May 2020, and the small desert town of Eddington, N.M., is locked down. County sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) doesn’t have much to do, other than complain about mask requirements and expel a muttering vagrant (Clifton Collins Jr.) from the bar where smooth-talking incumbent mayor Ted Garcia (Pascal) is holding a council meeting in defiance of social distancing rules.

Ted is about to sign a deal with a tech company called SolidGoldMagikarp to build a data center in town. He’s miffed but far from intimidated when Joe launches a rival mayoral campaign, plastering a cop car with slogans like YOUR [sic] BEING MANIPULATED.

It doesn’t help that Ted used to date Joe’s now-wife, Louise (Emma Stone). At home, Joe clumsily tries to reach out to the distant Louise, hoping she’ll consider starting a family. But she’s too busy being radicalized by a QAnon-adjacent movement led by a handsome grifter (Austin Butler).

The murder of George Floyd spurs the town’s youths to protest and divides Eddington in new ways, pushing Joe’s already-thin patience to its limits. When he snaps, everything goes haywire.

Will you like it?

Maybe it’s still too soon for Eddington — not because 2020 seems distant or because people would prefer to repress it but precisely because we’re still living in the world it built. While masks and social distancing protocols may be vintage details, the powder-keg tensions depicted in the movie haven’t cooled off. Like Robert Altman’s films of the early 1970s, or I Heart Huckabees in the wake of 9/11, Aster’s dark comedy captures a moment of cultural ferment when it’s still too early to feel like we have a handle on it.

Maybe that’s why I found myself watching with an eerie sense of dissociation. Compared with Aster’s previous film, the surrealist paranoid fantasy Beau Is Afraid, Eddington is downright realistic in its portrayal of small-town politics and love triangles, building its narrative detail by telling detail. Only toward the end does it verge into hallucinatory territory, and even then, everything can be “rationally explained” (scare quotes because nothing in the age of viral conspiracy theories feels rational).

Yet the movie infects us with a strange feeling that the real action is always happening just off-screen, beyond our reach. Sounds keep bleeding in from elsewhere. We seem to be forever over the characters’ shoulders, peering at their screens, which offer a nonstop parade of half-glimpsed anger and brutality. When violence erupts, we flinch at the effect before the cause appears.

Aster disorients us, much as Joe is increasingly disoriented. If we want someone to root for in the large cast, we’re out of luck. This is no Joker or ode to the forgotten man; Joe’s haplessness and cluelessness are played more for comedy than tragedy, and he’s less sympathetic the longer we know him.

Likewise, we may expect the conflict between Joe and Ted to become an iconic clash of values that brings us to a dialectical resolution. But we don’t get that, either. While Aster’s screenplay takes potshots at both sides — including a very funny portrait of an opportunistic teenage social justice warrior (Cameron Mann) — it doesn’t push centrism or an agenda of laying aside our differences. These characters are too far gone even to contemplate such a possibility. Instead of communicating, they yell or whisper past one another, each drawing inspiration from their handheld sources of rage and despair.

Eddington opens with the town vagrant ranting in the wilderness. By its midpoint, Joe is ranting just as incoherently, the law’s representative leading a march to anarchy. Trying to justify his actions, he insists that “We’re in the middle of it. In the middle of history.” He’s right, but that doesn’t mean he’s in control. The dominant narrative of the town’s rift keeps changing, and Aster suggests that the real masterminds are always out of sight.

Someday, Eddington may be considered a classic — or just a historical curiosity. For now, it’s a tough movie to watch because it has no moral center, and it withholds the catharsis that even the darkest horror films offer. You want to laugh at its absurdity, but then you realize you’re still living it.

If you like this, try…

Fargo (1996; MGM+, Pluto TV, Tubi, Roku Channel, YouTube Primetime, rentable): Imagine the Coen brothers’ drama with William H. Macy’s character as the sheriff instead of Frances McDormand’s beloved Marge Gunderson, and you’re starting to feel Eddington‘s vibe.

Bo Burnham: Inside (2021; Netflix): Few pieces of contemporaneous media sum up the pandemic era as well as the comedian’s musical special, which he created in isolation. For another time capsule, check out Homemade (2020; Netflix), an anthology of shorts from filmmakers in quarantine.

Pop. 1280. This 1964 Jim Thompson novel about a politically ambitious small-town sheriff, a blistering satire of fascist demagoguery, feels like an influence on Eddington. It inspired the film Coup de Torchon (1981; HBO Max), and Yorgos Lanthimos reportedly has been tapped to adapt it.