Ari Aster’s career has had a fascinating shift in the last couple of years. Announcing himself as a bright new name of viscerally-upsetting psychological horror with Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), his shift into absurdist black comedy has not forgotten its horror roots, though the definition of horror in his last two films, Beau is Afraid (2023) and now Eddington, has evolved past traditional horror (demon worship and cults) into a exploring the simple horrors of extreme paranoia. While Beau is Afraid was an example of fear within irrational insecurities, Eddington is about the fear of irrational behavior, all rooted in the mania of a collapsing society. While Hereditary and Midsommar were highly effective and memorable films of their genre, their themes could be viewed at a distance. Perhaps many do relate to grieving mothers or toxic relationships. In the case of Beau is Afraid, some could relate to the topics of sexual repression. With Eddington, Aster is making a film that no one in this country can escape the feeling of connection towards. He winds the clock back five years and forces us all to confront the very thing we’ve been lucky to finally put in the past: the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the fictional and miniscule town of Eddington, NM, Joaquin Phoenix portrays Sheriff Joe Cross, a fairly apolitical and warm-hearted cop living a quaint life with his secretly cult-obsessed wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her conspiracy-theory-brained mother Dawn (Dierdre O’Connell) as they handle the effects of the pandemic, two months in. There, Joe deals with complicated disagreements with democrat Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who has kept to enforcing lockdown rules, despite some of his own hypocrisies, and is up for re-election. In pursuit of forcing everything back to normal, Joe takes it upon himself to ignore the pandemic and also run for Mayor of Eddington. At the same time, a group of young liberal teens, including Ted’s son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) are suddenly radicalized by racial injustice after the death of George Floyd and take to the streets to protest, seemingly causing riots to break out in town, and chaos ensues.

Joaquin Phoenix is the perfect muse for Aster, who has been consistent with writing seemingly-innocent but trauma-burdened leads. Pascal shows off a unique hard-edge, hiding under the calm and cool nature of his people-pleasing mayoral occupation. Both O’Connell and Stone play a mother and daughter who feel frighteningly real, those that are the most influenced by what they see and hear online, though both have opposing ways of dealing with it. Stone, though underused, washes away her star persona to commit to a subtle and emotionally-distant character, whose real feelings are deeply hidden and too-easily corrupted and persuaded by the fear of what she reads online. Austin Butler stands out in a very small, but magnetic role as the internet-based cult leader whose spell she falls under, who preaches highly-questionable but persuasive delusions against modern society. Micheal Ward is excellent, giving an elusively stoic but internally-challenged performance as Cross’ trainee, who straddles the thin line of being both a noble cop and a black man in a post-BLM era. Clifton Collins, Jr., masked in filth and an unruly beard, is completely unrecognizable as the town vagrant, whose mentally-unstable mind could care less about the divided world happening around him.

While the initial plot of Eddington would have many turning up their noses or grimacing at its potential for bad politics, the story’s message of a collapsing, divided nation has very little to do with preferring a side. By the film’s end, it’s easy to interpret Aster’s personal politics despite our main protagonist being decidedly leaned on a right-wing persona. Joe Cross is the protagonist, but he is not necessarily a hero. Much like Spike Lee chose to do with Delroy Lindo’s character leading Da 5 Bloods (2020), Cross is a perfect examination of how simple people can be influenced to “choose a side”, those whose complicated and tragic backgrounds forced them into a box that they may proudly flaunt amongst their naysayers. To have made Cross left-wing would have been both cowardly and boring on Aster’s part. The beautiful challenge of staying engaged with Cross, should your politics differ, is understanding the nuance of what pushes him to do the inevitable upsetting things he winds up doing. Like many a Coen Brothers character, he is outwardly a simple and decent human being, and Phoenix plays him with such sincere and earnest conviction, but there is a selfish and dastardly impulse living inside of him, and once that impulse is acted upon, the lengths at which he goes to cover his tracks causes just as much mayhem as the world he’s now living in.

But to say Eddington is specifically about who is right in the dueling left vs. right mania undercuts what Aster is really trying to condemn, the real villain of the story: the internet. For the good of what social media did for us during that time to keep us connected also ignited a hysteria of dueling, hateful, contrasting opinions fighting for dominance and justification. Through likes, retweets, and shared posts, tech engagement accelerated at a horrifying speed and the more hysteria you took in, the more hysteria you put back out. It also examines a town that seems filled with those without specific ideologies find themselves wandering into certain boxes, aided through social media, and manufactured to fill a void or fulfill a selfish desire or rise above others. From the opening shot, Aster’s goal seems to be putting a spotlight on the nearly invisible root cause of the issue, and how easy it is for society to not realize when and how they are being manipulated with misinterpretation, misinformation, immediate opinion-sharing, and a lack of truth. While we use technology as a weapon, we are also being weaponized by technology itself, which is far more likely to lead to our real-life downfall than it will our prosperity. Now, that’s horror.