Eddington

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."
— Mark Twain

There is a town, in the heart of the American nowhere, called Eddington, where the streets are empty because everyone is on social media. It is not a place, but a condition—a bubble of reality suspended between pandemic and paranoia, where everyone has an opinion, a belief, a theory, a conspiracy to cling to. And, as in any good contemporary parable, no one is wrong—but neither is anyone right.

In Ari Aster’s film, two figures confront each other like in a moral western disguised as political satire: Joe Cross, the sheriff played by Joaquin Phoenix, and Ted Garcia, the pragmatic mayor portrayed by Pedro Pascal. Around them exists a microcosm of citizens who seem to have stepped out of a group session somewhere between Levinas and TikTok: Louise (Emma Stone), Joe’s wife, torn between the search for faith and fascination with her mother’s conspiracy theories, Dawn, who turns every dinner into an apocalypse talk show; and the youth, with their smartphones, their righteous causes, and their conviction of already being a 4K legend.

In this universe saturated with opinions, Eddington becomes the propagandistic laboratory of an era where power no longer governs: it simply replicates, spreads, and reproduces like a virus. It is a film about the nihilism of power, about the ontology of the annulment of decision—the form of impotence masquerading as freedom that we call “participation.”

Everyone believes they have an answer, a truth, a solution. Everyone fights for something. Yet every struggle is ultimately instrumentalized: the religious sect and the activist, the preacher and the influencer, Black Lives Matter and police violence all become pieces of the same mosaic of simulacra. No one truly believes in anything anymore, yet everyone believes—at least thinks they do—with fervor.

Aster orchestrates this delirium with surgical irony: every discussion is a moral duel, every post a condemnation, every smile a sign of despair. From pedophilia to activism, from faith to fake news, Eddington touches everything that burns—and does so with the ease of a film that knows tragedy has become routine, and that true horror has turned into spectacle.

The violence of feelings is evil, the film suggests: not physical, but emotional, demanding authenticity at any cost. It is the violence of public confession, compulsive self-narration, identity as performance. In this collective psychopathology, no one truly counts, yet everyone feels like a protagonist. Value is no longer measured in deeds but in algorithms. You exist if you are seen, you matter if you are recorded: and so everyone films everyone, in an endless loop of capture, accusation, and self-absolution.

The monstrous dolls sewn from the sheriff’s wife’s traumas are disturbing icons, a contemporary symbol—they represent human deformation better than any philosophical essay. They are our emotional prostheses, our recycled search for meaning. Aster films them with a grotesque aesthetic, as if they were the most sincere witnesses of a world that no longer believes in the difference between horror and humanity.

The direction blends western and horror, political thriller and dark comedy: a style both sumptuous and miserable. The desert around Eddington is the true protagonist: a mental landscape where every certainty evaporates, every idea repeats, every gesture is captured by an invisible camera. There, in the middle of nowhere, the sheriff attempts to calm passions, the sofa becomes the saloon, and the gun is just a prop for those who have already fired all their truths.

The film is perfect in its imbalance, magnificent in its provocation. Only the ending—those fifteen extra minutes, however sarcastic about white supremacism—betrays a slight indulgence, as if Aster, after revealing the void, also wanted to explain it. But the void cannot be explained.

Because Eddington, beneath its guise of American tragedy, is also a profoundly comic film. Not in the sense of lightness, but in the oldest sense of the word: the comic as revelation of the absurd, as defusing of pain through repetition, as mockery of the very idea of coherence. What destroys us here, entertains us; and vice versa.

Ultimately, Eddington is a merciless and irresistible vision of the present and its algorithms: a live apocalypse, orchestrated with moral precision and metaphysical sarcasm. It is the portrait of a world that speaks of peace but communicates only through violence, that seeks meaning but finds only performance, that survives by inertia, to the point of exhaustion.

A desperate film and, in a perverse way, also funny—because there is nothing more hilarious than watching humanity drown in its own need to feel real.

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
— Oscar Wilde