Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: EDDINGTON [Cannes Film Festival 2025 - Cannes, France]

The tendency of an Ari Aster film is to want to go off the deep end but usually with something in mind. "Eddington" [Competition] is a slightly different setting than he usually does. However its thought process, though slightly removed, is still pertinent but in a different way. Often collaborator Joaquin Phoenix is here in different form. He is trying to play a little more of an everyman but one with a grudge possibly to bear and a sense of himself that becomes stripped away as time goes on. He is the sheriff of a small town where everyone knows everybody and everybody knows everybody's business. His first foe is one in the current mayor of the town: Garcia (played by Pedro Pascal), an affable man who wants his fair shake but does have some weird contexts in his past, specifically with the Sheriff's now wife. Emma Stone plays the wife in question, separated by reality, plagued by trauma and definitely undergoing a reality crisis of sorts. Stone doesn't really have much to work with here although there might have been more earlier. It is a context of why she wasn't give that possibility beyond the fact that this is Phoenix's story (and oddly enough his mother-in- law).

This story takes places around the time of the first COVID lockddown and the George Floyd murder. The kids in the town start talking about suffering but that they can't in ways understand because, as they chant, they are white. The movie is of course laced in sarcasm but it plays itself slightly seriously for a while. However as the Sheriff starts acting more and more strange (like running for Mayor) and detached, one understands that it is only a matter of time before it goes off the rails. This is more accessible than their last collaboration and once it hits, it really runs (but there is also a suspension of disbelief like with any of Aster's films). Aster is not Alex Garland who also works with A24. "Eddington" lives to make one uneasy but so did "Civil War" but that was one was based heavier in dread.

The difference here is in Phoenix who definitely has full control of what he is doing on this one. Pescal is not given much wiggle room and neither are the Sheriff's deputies. They have to serve the plot which is fine. Austin Butler as a would-be guru teacher pushes back at Phoenix with the same weirdness and that is where the best energy lies. A scene on the back porch with a group of people including Stone is the best acting in the movie. Stone has her moment in this scene followed by Butler though the dialogues is meant to push this narrative off kilter (though it runs the gamut of almost being too indulgent). As the manipulations begin to mount, the movie adds another element that throws it into full satire and yet tries to do it with a straight face. That said it is exhilerating in its own way and really kicks everyone in the face in a good way towards the finale. This is what Aster is good at (and this probably cost considerably less than the last film). "Eddington" takes a while to get going but once it finds it absurdity it really allows for a good kick in the face. B+

By Tim Wassberg