Eddington is a sour-spirited and self-indulgent parody

Eddington, though. Of course we don’t love it. It’s hard to imagine a more calculatedly unlovable feature. This is not cinema that targets the warm and fuzzies; it’s an obnoxious, smirking, Grand Guignol distortion – a fairground mirror reflection of the Covid-era US losing its collective shit.

It’s a western in which the untamed frontier is social media. A horror that is entirely populated by monsters. It’s a fusillade of snark aimed at snowflakes on both sides of the political spectrum.

All of which is perhaps making Eddington sound better – or at least more interesting – than it actually is. But the problem is that, unlike Aster’s previous movies, I’m not sure there’s much to admire in this bloated, self-indulgent parody of a country and a political landscape currently beyond parody. Satire without wit and insight is not satire. It’s just trolling.

It’s late May 2020 in the fictional small town of Eddington, New Mexico. The country is in lockdown and, for the reactionary local sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), the battle lines have been drawn on multiple fronts. The first thing Joe goes to war against is the mask mandate. He views the instruction to wear a face covering in public spaces as a violation of his freedom of choice and militantly shops, maskless, in the Eddington convenience store under the hostile gaze of other customers.

But the main target of Joe’s ire is the smarmy mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is running for re-election. There’s bad blood between the two men: Ted may or may not have had a relationship with Joe’s unstable wife Louise (Emma Stone), which, according to Louise’s mother, voracious conspiracy theorist Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), resulted in a teen pregnancy. Joe decides to challenge Ted for the mayoral position, campaigning on an anti-mask platform that soon extends to embrace a grab bag of deep-state pop paranoia: “Your [sic] being manipulated” reads one of the signs on Ted’s patrol vehicle turned campaign SUV.

Meanwhile, Louise has fallen even further down the online conspiracy rabbit hole than her mother and has been sucked into the orbit of a charismatic “truth teller” (Austin Butler), who claims to be a victim of a child-trafficking network run by a cabal of powerful elites. The teenagers in town fare no better; they’re all screeching militants who preach social justice and parrot protest slogans without understanding them. At times, it feels like doom-scrolling through the most stridently hate-filled and bonkers corners of X.

Aster is at least an equal opportunities provocateur, mocking and disdainful of all political ideologies. But the film is so snide in its approach, so casually dismissive of its characters, that it’s a struggle to find anything or anyone to care about. Plus, there’s an ugly false equivalency at play here; the feature seems to suggest that the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, is as deserving of ridicule as the wackadoo fruitloop fringe that argues 9/11 was the result of a controlled explosion.

It does, at least, look striking. Darius Khondji’s photography captures a kind of blighted beauty in the landscape. Eddington is a desert town, nestled in earth that has been baked to a florid, dehydrated red. It’s the kind of sand-blasted dust bowl that makes you want to cough your ribcage inside out even before the Covid virus splutters into the community. It’sa town in which water is at a premium, but that, thanks to Garcia’s shady dealings, is about to become the site of a massive, resource-sucking datacentre.

In one revealing moment, Joe tosses a bottle of mineral water to a localhomeless man, who swats it to the floor derisively, rejecting the very thing that might keep him alive. The man is quite disturbed, of course, but then so is pretty much everyone in this cartoonishly overblown vision of a contemporary US that is tearing itself to pieces, while the very worst people imaginable stage a power grab.

This is the sort of divisive picture that may be ripe for reappraisal at some point in the future. It may, God forbid, turn out to be prescient. But having watched it twice, I can’t imagine revisiting it and seeing much beyond a sour-spirited provocation with little of value to say about the world.

Photograph by A24