A lot of critics have labeled Ari Aster’s latest provocation a modern Western owing to certain superficial signifiers—cowboy hats, a desert-adjacent setting—but to me it’s closer in spirit to Breaking Bad, and not just because the titular town is in New Mexico. Aster successfully conjures up a place that feels untethered, as if it had been built yesterday, its faux-suburban facade struggling to pass itself off as genuine small town America. Breaking Bad, which presented Albuquerque as a city whose economic identity is built on criminal activity, had a similar vibe that affected every facet of the story and characters. One of the subplots of Eddington has the local Indian residents complaining about how their land has been repurposed without their permission, mainly by a big tech company that’s building a huge data center on the outskirts of Eddington. So when COVID comes to town, it just further undermines an already shaky foundation.

The conflict is between the town’s sherriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), and the town’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Garcia has implemented mandatory social distancing and mask regulations, while Cross thinks they’re overkill and isn’t keen on enforcing them. When push comes literally to shove in a local supermarket, Cross decides to run against Garcia in the next election for mayor, and Aster, whose comic smarts were not really exercised to their fullest in his previous films, sets up Cross’s campaign as supreme farce. As it soon becomes clear, Cross’s gripe with Garcia is personal, which makes the enmity that much more difficult to mitigate and inflates the nominally political battle into something more deadly. Complicating Cross’s ambitions is his emotionally troubled wife, Louise (Emma Stone), who, confined to home due to lockdown, falls under the spell of her conspiracy-addled mother (Dierdre O’Connell), who hooks her up with a charismatic motivational speaker (Austin Butler). Other controversies-of-the-moment affecting the mayoral campaign include the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. As Phoenix plays him, Cross is a monumentally insecure man who finds himself in a public position that calls for a kind of hyper-masculine assertiveness, and in trying to fit that image he runs off the rails in an extremely reckless manner. 

Aster has never been afraid of taking his premises to their wildest conclusions, and he does a neat job of bringing all the various elements together in a climactic showdown that has to be seen to be believed—even if its narrative endpoints are not believable at all. Aster’s idea is that America is at the tipping point of senselessness in its civic integrity. He doesn’t bother distinguishing between ideologies or political preferences. Everyone has had a hand in driving the democratic experiment off a cliff, and he’s just there to film the wreck in slow motion. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Eddington home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Joe Cross For Mayor Rights LLC