Ari Aster’s Eddington, 2025 unfolds less as a conventional narrative than as a sustained mood: tense, uncanny, and uncomfortable. Set in a small New Mexico town still dealing with the Covid pandemic, the film captures a society drifting in and out of coherence, where truth is no longer a shared foundation but a contested terrain. What Aster has crafted is, ostensibly, a black comedy — yet the laughter it provokes is nervous, almost involuntary, emerging from the gaps between absurdity and dread.
At the film’s heart is Joaquin Phoenix (Joe Cross) and his long time personal dispute with the town’s mayor played by Pedro Pascal (Ted Garcia) who is seeking reelection. Phoenix delivers a performance of remarkable fragility as his character is not a grandly tragic figure but an ordinary man, slowly unravelling under the weight of a reality too fractured to contain. His descent is at once personal and political, a mirror of a society in which conspiracy and mistrust seep into every interaction.
Amélie Hoeferle gives stirring performance as a young political radical whose idealism is both magnetic and troubling. She becomes one of the film’s pivot characters — a figure through whom we are confronted with questions of agency, resistance, and the blurred lines between radical truth-telling and reckless provocation.
Threaded through this human drama is a more sinister force: a covert team, funded by a Big Tech conglomerate, tasked with destabilising local resistance to the construction of a data centre. Aster presents this not as speculative dystopia but as a logical extension of present realities.
The imagery is relentless as the community quietly erodes into civic mistrust, underpinned by social media/misinformation, conspiracy theorists, shape shifting politicians and their corporate pay masters.
The film’s progression is one of steady accretion. Aster layers unease upon unease, withholding release until the final act, when tension gives way to outright spectacle. The climax, a violent eruption Rambo style, risks excess, but it also feels earned: a grotesque, almost satirical catharsis, underscoring the absurdity of a world in which paranoia itself has become a governing logic.
Eddington 2025 is, in the end, less about plot than about atmosphere, less about answers than about the sensation of disorientation in an age where truth is pliable and reality negotiable. It is an unsettling work, but also a vital one: a mirror held up to a moment in history where the boundaries between comedy, horror, truth and fiction have all but collapsed. Go watch.
Irregular Frequencies 