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A24 is known for its prestige arthouse films, but in its early days as a distributor, it made most of its money from elevated horror films like Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar. Over a decade in, the ambitions of A24 and Aster have expanded beyond genre film. But for both, the more recent results have been mixed.

Eddington, Aster’s latest, feels like a continuation of the maximalist guilt-trip Beau Is Afraid. Joaquin Phoenix stars once again, though the concerns here are less Jewish and Oedipal and more wokeness and conspiracy theories. It’s grounded in the contemporary: the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically. The movie’s tagline is “hindsight is 2020,” which is fitting for a movie that is clever and empty.

In a fictional New Mexican town, Sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix) is unhappy about statewide COVID-19 precautions. He’s not a clean stand-in for any particular kind of conservative; he simply hates wearing a mask, claiming that a KN95 is oppressive as someone who suffers from asthma. Though coronavirus has not arrived in Eddington yet, the anxiety created by mask mandates, grocery lines, and online misinformation loom just as large over the town as the virus itself. Cross doesn’t like what the world has become so he announces on a livestream that he will run for mayor.

Eddington is supposed to be a microcosm of what’s wrong with the US, though Aster’s diagnosis feels overly broad. The film works better when it comes to the finer details. The town is full of weirdos, embodied by a strong and familiar cast: Pedro Pascal plays incumbent mayor Ted Garcia, who’s in the middle of selling out Eddington’s future with the construction of a massive AI data center; Emma Stone plays Cross’ wife Louise, who makes scary dolls as a hobby; Deirdre O’Connell is her mother Dawn, a YouTube-susceptible conspiracy theorist; Austin Butler makes an appearance as Vernon, a cult leader with tattoos that evoke a Hillsong pastor. In some ways, watching the first hour of Eddington feels a bit like watching a Wes Anderson movie or maybe Yorgos Lanthimos’ cruel triptych Kinds of Kindness. The delights come from watching a bunch of recognizable actors inhabit and bounce off odd characters. (You get the sense that they had a good time on set, too.)

As a time capsule of 2020, the movie also confronts Black Lives Matter protests, though the leader of Eddington’s anti-racist movement is a white high schooler (Amélie Hoeferle) who repeatedly gives her ex, a Black police officer named Michael (Micheal Ward), tone-deaf lectures about joining the marches. Two other teenage characters begin protesting mostly because they think she’s hot. Aster finds a lot of his jokes in the grating nature of social justice language.

For all its themes, the early parts of Eddington are light on moralizing or righteousness. Even if the setups are somewhat obvious — the annoying performativeness of the left, the boneheaded ignorance of the right — the punchlines mostly land. Eddington posits that the thing that both sides can agree on is that, progressive or conservative, we are all manipulated by our phones and the incentives of social media. If the idea is obvious, at least Aster pulls it off convincingly.

That is, until the last hour or so. Maybe Aster just struggles with endings? Tonally, Hereditary ’s ending works as a de-escalation, though the final twist is unsatisfying; the atrocious last act of Beau Is Afraid is as surreal as it is irritating, with Richard Kind stepping in as a kind of inverse Bing Bong. In Eddington, though, all of the threads that Aster puts into place seem to unravel as Joe Cross’ motivations take an unconvincing, violent turn. Without giving it away, the plot moves in an absurdist direction — a fine choice for a black comedy, but a disappointing one in a film that begins with a more compelling, grounded worldview.

Maybe five years isn’t enough time to understand what exactly the pandemic did to us as individuals or as a society, but I think anyone would suspect that it’s more complicated than “it broke our brains.” If nothing else, Eddington proves that that reasoning is deeply boring on a narrative level. Joe Cross’ unexpected arc, despite Phoenix’s beguiling performance, comes across as confused and unearned.

Eddington is memorable, though. Again, it’s the details. At the police station, an officer’s desktop computer is covered in anime stickers; you catch a brief glimpse of a TikTok video of a white woman doing a celebratory dance after reading Giovanni’s Room. I could be convinced to watch Eddington again just to see all the hilarious, meticulous touches that Aster has embedded in the scenery. As a filmmaker, he demonstrates a strong care for the craft — so much thought has been put into the cinematography, the sets, the evocation of the pandemic. You just wish that same effort had been put into any of the film’s ideas.

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Eddington is in theaters nationwide July 18.