CannesFestival-Eddington review: Ari Aster’s Black-Comedy Horror shows America Crumbling in the Tumultuous Pandemic Era

Eddington is a fictional small town in Arizona, metaphorically looking backwards and forwards across the history of America. Law enforcement is still handled by a sheriff, and several of his varyingly abled deputies; future development is promised by the building of an ambiguous data center, perhaps as an indication of the processing power needed if we’re to rely on generative AI. It borders Native American land, the majority of adults own guns, and housing runs from mansions to a grungy skid row. Ari Aster - a director who flourished in skin-crawlingly disturbing horror, helping him gain the stature of a serious auteur - is right to intuit this American “median” is dangling on a precipice, and the COVID-19 pandemic was the final push.

With this large-ensemble black-comedy horror-thriller, Aster tries to take the tenor of the times, almost in the form of a surrealist spin on Robert Altman’s Nashville, directly quoted through the lead character Sheriff Joe Cross’s gaudy campaign car as he mounts a mayoral challenge, and the direct proper noun of the title. The craziness begins ominously in May 2020, with Cross losing his rag at the restrictions on civil liberties due to the nationwide lockdown. Having a stormy relationship already with the town’s mayor Ted Garcia (a cheery Pedro Pascal, slightly evoking “mayor” Pete Buttigieg), he refuses to wear a mask at a grocery store, and feels he occupies the moral high-ground after arguing again with Garcia outside. This creates a comic, populist electoral stand-off - a dumbass against an upstanding Democrat. Does that sound familiar?

May 2020 in the US of course leads into another historic event: the Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd by a law enforcement officer. The election inevitably gets folded and defined by this urgent issue - like much discourse around the country - leading to riskily impulsive and pragmatic decisions by all the characters (including Joe’s mentally fragile wife Louise, played by Emma Stone) as the town becomes enlivened by the protests, and actors on their fringes like Antifa.

It may depend on the viewer’s taste, but a unique and abrasive tone is created via low-brow comedy, sight gags and exaggerated caricatures of the different sides’ views. Aster probably thinks he’s working on the level of an elite newspaper commentator, as well as an entertainer, a factor that leaves a lot to be desired, but if his points aren’t insightful or radical, many of them are really funny. Across two-and-a-half hours, the film and his overall control seems to slip and slide between pertinent moments, pure indulgence and ill-advised plot byways. But for me, this was still another strong exhibition of what Aster has provided to American film, some of which has been partially made in his image through the rise of “elevated” horror and now his production company Square Peg: energy, absurdity, comic timing, grotesquerie, and now, a bit of politics.