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Ari Aster is a 39-year-old American director, screenwriter, and producer. He was born in New York City. His poet mother and jazz musician father moved to England for a while, and then, when Aster was ten, the family moved to New Mexico. Aster has described his childhood self as a fat kid with a crippling stutter who was alienated from others, kicked out of prep school, and obsessed with horror films. “I’ve wanted to make my New Mexico movie since I was a kid,” he says. In a YouTube video, Aster jokes about being “in the closet.” When discussing a relationship, he refers to his significant other as “they” rather than “he” or “she.” I have found no conclusive information about whether or not Aster is gay. Aster appears, in interviews, as a pale, slight, bespectacled, articulate, movie-obsessed nebbish.
His 2018 horror film Hereditary made a big splash. On July 18, 2025, Aster released Eddington, a “neo-Western.” Eddington addresses COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, incest, prejudice against Native Americans, and societal breakdown caused by excessive internet use. Some hail Eddington as a “masterpiece.” Plenty of other critics, both professional and amateur, argue that in Eddington, Aster bit off more than he could chew. The film never gels, they say, and the last act descends into violent chaos.
Professional reviewers at Rottentomatoes award Eddington a measly 69% score; amateur reviewers give it 65%. These numbers don’t tell the whole story, though. Among the reviews by professionals and amateurs alike, some praise Eddington, and others brutalize the film. The Boston Globe calls Eddington “inchoate and tonally inert;” The Toronto Star says it is “a satire without laughs. A fright movie without jump scares. A western without an obvious villain. A social commentary minus a moral compass.” The New Yorker diagnoses “the problem with Eddington is not that Aster judges his characters. It’s that he barely finds them interesting enough to judge, and his boredom proves infectious.” Peter Bradshaw, in the Guardian, is merciless. Eddington is a “bafflingly dull movie, a laborious and weirdly self-important satire which makes a heavy, flavorless meal of some uninteresting and unoriginal thoughts.”
But then there’s this, from Elle: “artistically complete and compulsively watchable.” Jacobin, a socialist magazine, identifies Eddington as “a tragic masterpiece” that speaks “for a victory for humanity itself. For society to assert itself against the compulsions of anti-social, market-driven forces. For our pursuit of the collective good to triumph over the immediacy of our personal vanities.” At the opposite end of the political spectrum, The American Conservative proclaims that Eddington is “The must-see COVID masterpiece … one of the best films of 2025 … For conservatives who felt unheard during the COVID era, Eddington is oddly destined to become a stranger-than-fiction cult classic.”
Google’s audience reviews award Eddington 2.9 stars, out of a possible five stars. The score is less informative than Google’s bar graph. The bar for one-star reviews is longer than any other bar on the bar graph. But the bar for five-star reviews is almost as long as the one-star-reviews bar. Clearly, both professional and amateur reviewers are seeing two different Eddingtons. One film is a masterpiece. The other is a mess. As ever, money may have the last word. Eddington is a box office flop. The film may have cost between $25 and $50 million. As of mid-August, its box office is $11.5 million.
Below I’ll summarize Eddington, and then say more about my own reaction. By the way, Arthur Eddington (1882 – 1944) was a British scientist. The 2008 film Einstein and Eddington depicts Eddington as a closeted gay man. I found speculation online about a relationship between the scientist and the film, but no proof.
Eddington opens in the fictional town of Eddington, New Mexico. It is 2020. COVID-19 stalks the land. Conservative Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) does not want to wear a mask. Liberal Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) does wear a mask, and he encourages others to do so. Cross and Garcia clash, not just over masks, but also over Cross’ wife Louise (Emma Stone). Louise is housebound, and often bed-bound. She makes oddly shaped dolls, and tries to sell them over the internet. Joe Cross, her loving husband, buys them anonymously, to encourage his wife. Louise is cold to her husband. He tries to make love to her, but she requests that he stop. Louise doesn’t just deny Cross affection. She also denies him his lifelong dream of being a father. She does not want to have his children.
Louise had once dated Ted Garcia, and Cross concludes that Garcia traumatized Louise. That’s why, he thinks, Louise does not want intimacy with him. In addition to his Cross’ other problems, his mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), lives with him and Louise. Dawn is a conspiracy theorist who is poisoning Louise’s mind. If all that were not bad enough, the home includes a shrine to Dawn’s late husband and Louise’s father, who was the previous sheriff. The shrine includes a photo of the man and candles. Viewers will eventually learn that it was this man, Louise’s sheriff father, who sexually abused her, not Ted Garcia. Cross begins a run against Ted Garcia for mayor. To boost his campaign, Cross alleges that Garcia raped his wife. Louise denies this publicly.
A controversy roils in the background. A tech giant, SolidGoldMagikarp, wants to build a data center in Eddington and also on Pueblo land. Data centers use huge amounts of water, and Eddington is in an arid zone. The data center’s water usage may turn Eddington into a ghost town. Garcia supports the data center.
Black Lives Matter protests spring up. Garcia’s son Eric participates, as does his frenemy, Brian. Both compete for the attention of protest leader Sarah, an attractive blonde. Sarah, who is white, hectors Michael, an officer who works for Joe Cross, to join the protest. Michael indicates that he doesn’t want to be thought of as a token black man, or as Sarah’s trophy.
Cross, ever eager to convince his wife to show him some affection, prepares a special dinner for her. While waiting for Louise to arrive, Cross falls asleep at the table. Louise finally arrives late, along with internet conspiracy theorist Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler). Peak makes outlandish claims about having been sexually trafficked as a child to men who hunt children as prey. Louise, who had previously appeared lifeless, comes to life as Peak speaks. Her face shows outrage, commitment, determination, and passion. Upset that Cross alleged that Garcia had raped her, when in fact she says that it was her father, Louise leaves her husband and becomes Peak’s mistress and the mother of his child.
Cross receives a noise complaint. He drives to the Garcia residence where Garcia is hosting a party, which is, of course, against the COVID-19 rules that Garcia himself has verbally supported. Cross turns down the volume on Garcia’s audio system. Garcia turns it back up and slaps Cross, twice, in front of party guests. Cross leaves quietly.
Back in town, Cross encounters a bum muttering incoherently and vandalizing a bar. Cross shoots the bum dead. Cross travels back to the Garcia residence and shoots Garcia and his son Eric dead. Cross spray paints Antifa graffiti on the home’s wall, in order to divert attention from his own guilt. Later, Cross attempts to frame Michael, his black underling, for the murders. Michael is arrested and locked in jail. Pueblo Officer Butterfly Jimenez sees evidence that suggests to him that Cross is the real killer.
A jet flies. A hand grasping a globe is painted on the jet. Inside the jet, what appear to be Antifa combatants prepare for battle. Most of the rest of the movie consists of scenes of over-the-top violence between the Antifa combatants, who have arrived by plane, and Cross, Michael, and another deputy named Guy, as well as Jimenez. Weapons include bombs, fire, a machine gun, and a knife. Guy and Jimenez are killed, guaranteeing that Cross will get away with his murder. Michael is badly wounded by Antifa. Michael survives, but his handsome face is deeply scarred. An Antifa combatant stabs Cross in the head.
Because of the knife to the head, Joe Cross is reduced to what appears to be a vegetative state. He is in a wheelchair, unable to speak. He is, though, elected mayor. What looked to this viewer like an Hispanic home health aide must place Cross on the toilet. Phoenix is fully nude for this toilet scene; the viewer sees his private parts. Cross now lives with Dawn, his mother-in-law. Dawn is the power behind Cross. She is acting mayor. Cross and Dawn attend the opening of the data center. Later, Cross is placed in bed by Dawn and the health aide. Dawn gets into bed next to Cross, and the attendant gets into bed beside her.
Pop quiz: after you’ve read the above plot summary, please tell me what you think Eddington is all about. I’ll reveal, below, what Aster says his movie is all about.
Normally, when reviewing a movie, it’s easy for me to say, “I loved” or liked or was bored by or hated the movie. In addition to the film’s artistry, I react to the film’s message or theme. I can’t say any of those things about Eddington, because, as I sat in the theater, I never had the sense that I was watching a movie. I felt like I was witnessing Ari Aster exerting himself excessively in an attempt to put a puzzle together. I wasn’t the one trying to put the puzzle together – nothing about Eddington intrigued me enough to want to put the puzzle together. Also, I didn’t feel like Aster had left any room for me, the viewer, to have an opinion. When watching other movies, willing suspension of disbelief allows me to feel that I am having my own experience. I never felt that way about Eddington. I felt that Aster never let any aspect of the film slip from his hands into mine. I had no reaction to the film’s message or theme, because I had no idea what Aster was trying to say, if anything at all.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Eddington is about two and a half hours long. By the time the final scenes have rolled around, I have seen Cross, the main character, a character Aster labors to make sympathetic, reduced to non-verbal helplessness. Eddington, the town we’ve spent the last couple of hours in, is about to be destroyed by an amoral corporation. Pueblo Indians will be displaced. All this destruction left me completely cold. As I watched the aide place Cross on the toilet, my only reaction was to ask myself, “Why did Aster choose to show Phoenix’s private parts in this scene?” My best guess was that Phoenix’s full frontal nudity was Aster’s way of driving home Cross’ complete emasculation and humiliation. His wife rejected him sexually. His wife crushed his dream of being a father. A con artist stole his wife from him. His hated mother-in-law is the puppet-master, exploiting him for her own power. Ted Garcia irked him so much that he violated any moral code he may have once followed and turned him into a murderer. Now Cross, who, the film has suggested, is a racist against Pueblo Indians, blacks, and Hispanics, is helpless in the hands of an Hispanic aide. And this aide shares his bed at night. Aster calls Joe’s end “karmic punishment.”
Which brings me to Aster’s filmography, and a scene from his break-out movie, Hereditary. In 2011, Ari Aster wrote and directed the short film, The Strange Thing about the Johnsons. In this film, a son repeatedly sexually assaults his own father. The father is hit by a car and killed. The mother stabs the son to death. In his 2013 short film, Munchhausen, a mother, obsessed with her son, poisons her son to death. In his 2019 mainstream release, Midsommar, Nordic commune-dwelling Pagans torture American college students to death, including by burning one alive. In Beau is Afraid, from 2023, the main character, for the film’s three-hour runtime, endures various hideous mishaps. He finally unites with his mother at the end, and she is mean to him. Beau dies.
I have a conflicted relationship with horror films. As I’ve mentioned in previous pieces, I grew up in a tiny house with five older siblings. We had one black-and-white TV, and it was in the living room where I slept, until an older sibling left home and I got to share a bed in a bedroom with no TV, but with two other siblings. When I was very young and sleeping on the living room couch, I could not escape my older siblings’ affection for horror movies. These movies scared me. I felt that I needed to become brave and not be scared by horror movies.
When Hereditary caused a big buzz, with serious critics calling it a masterpiece, I knew I had to see it. In one scene, a teenage boy, Peter (Alex Wolff), repeatedly beats his face into his desk in a high school classroom. Blood and mucus stream from his injured face onto the desk. His face deteriorates. The teacher and fellow students stare at him. Peter is horrified by his own behavior. Wolff well conveys terror, helplessness, and vulnerability.
In other scenes, while Peter drives a car, Peter’s little sister sticks her head out the car window. She is decapitated by a telephone pole. Peter’s mother inadvertently sets her husband on fire. And Peter witnesses his mother decapitate herself. There are lots of corpses surrounded by swarms of flies.
While watching Hereditary, the so-called scariest movie ever made, I was not afraid. Most of these scenes struck me as simply ridiculous. I laughed out loud when wife and mom Toni Collette set her innocent husband Gabriel Byrne on fire. Watching the face-mashing scene, I was offended. An actor was compelled to perform believable acts of self-mutilation on camera. The scene insulted human dignity. For what? To deepen viewers’ understanding of the human condition? No, the scene exists to satisfy viewers’ cheap, primitive hunger for gore.
Compare Aster’s gore-fests to two powerhouse classics in the horror genre. The 1973 William Friedkin film The Exorcist also engages in gore. At least The Exorcist was coherent. Chris is an actress. She is a divorced career-woman who can’t give her daughter Regan all the love she needs. Atheist Chris does not teach Regan to be religious. Lonely Regan plays around with a Ouija board, through which she contacts an evil spirit named Captain Howdy. In the film’s logic, all of that was enough to invite satanic possession. Chris has to drop her atheism. Chris invites Catholic priests to restore Regan.
The demon who possesses Regan has coherent motivation. He wants to steal souls away from God and drive them to Hell. In various extra-Biblical retellings, Satan used to be an angel – an exalted being. Satan refused to humble himself appropriately. God punished him by sending him to Hell. Out of resentment, jealousy, and injured pride, he attempts to lure humans to damnation, thus thwarting God’s loving desire to redeem humans and gather them unto himself in Heaven.
The gore in The Exorcist has a point. Regan looks disgusting, and spews filthy words, in order to cause the humans witnessing this display to feel despair and doubt the power of God. The demon is after a big fish – Father Karras, the man conducting the exorcism. If a demon can drag a Catholic priest to Hell, the demon wins extra points.
Within the fictional world of the film, The Exorcist created a coherent system of choice, punishment, and reward for the human characters, and motivation for the supernatural character. Mothers need to raise their daughters in the church; daughters must not play with Ouija boards and chat with nasty demon men. That exaggerated system, taking down a few levels from the world of cinematic fantasy to everyday reality, becomes applicable to our real lives. Mothers do benefit their children by loving them, knowing with whom they are hanging out, and training them in a belief system that strengthens and protects them from threat. Pubescent girls should not talk to strange men, whether they contact them through Ouija boards or the local bar. Given how ugly life can be, it is easy to despair. Despair is the enemy of human health, mental and physical, and humans need a source of hope and meaning to soldier successfully through their travails.
The 1963 Robert Wise horror classic, The Haunting offers one of the most depressing denouements of any film. Eleanor, the main character, is not a bad person; she’s not ugly; she’s not stupid. She’s just a tad offbeat. She’s a mousy, socially awkward, naive spinster. She has no place in life, no job, no home, no friends. She sleeps on her married sister’s couch. Because she’s never been able to make a place for herself, she surrenders her life force to an evil, haunted house.
This is all very sad, but, again, the film tells us that Eleanor has agency. Theodora, a brutally honest psychic, tries to help Eleanor, by telling Eleanor harsh truths about her naivety and life choices. Theo is self-possessed, and she offers Eleanor a possible role model. An unmarried woman, past her first youth, can make her way in the world. Rather than benefiting from her interaction with Theo, Eleanor retreats into self-protective self-pity. She snaps at Theo and doesn’t heed Theo’s warnings. Eleanor ends up not just dead, but undead, in a haunted house.
The Haunting offers its main character agency. Eleanor is in a maze, a difficult one. But that maze did have an escape route, one Theo suggested to Eleanor, but Eleanor refused to take the route. As a viewer, I can invest in Regan’s and Eleanor’s journeys through the mazes their films place them in, because I know that there is an escape route. And as deeply invested in the supernatural as The Haunting is, there is a lesson to be taken back to the real world. If your life, like Eleanor’s life, sucks, stop fantasizing about unobtainable romantic partners, as Eleanor does. Quit wallowing in self-pity. Face reality. See a therapist. Exercise resilience.
I could not invest in the face smashing scene in Hereditary. Peter has no agency. He makes no choices. There is no escape from the maze Ari Aster constructed for him. Why is Peter suffering? Because his grandmother was a witch. That’s the meaning of the title, Hereditary. Peter is doomed, and so is everyone else in the film. There’s no navigation of a maze to invest in here. Watching all the grand guignol that Aster serves up, the face smashing, the immolation, the two decapitations, the corpses swarmed by flies, I saw no motivation for the demon behind all this mayhem. Why did the demon want Peter’s face smashed? I had no clue. The scene offended me, yes, but it also made no sense to me as anything other than gore for gore’s sake. That’s why Aster’s work does not scare me. It just offends me.
In Hereditary, Aster hands his characters a menu with no choices except “Doom.” He places his characters in a maze with no exit. Chris and Regan allied themselves with Catholic priests to defeat their demon. Eleanor could have chosen Theo’s bracing honesty as a route out of her misery. There is no such competition between life-affirming and life-destroying forces in Hereditary. You just watch one character after another be destroyed. Once the film ends and the lights in the theater go up, there’s no lesson to take back to the real world.
For a while there, I watched as Aster struggled to make Eddington’s Joe Cross a sympathetic character. We are supposed to feel for him as he is tender with his cold wife. But then Aster has Cross commit three murders in a row, including a murder of a father in front of his son, and then his son, and then frame his innocent black underling for these murders. I didn’t lose sympathy for Cross at that point, because, again, I had never experienced any willing suspension of disbelief in the film. Rather, my reaction was, boy oh boy, whatever point Ari Aster is trying to make here, he is willing to sacrifice any integrity he has endowed his characters with. Cross was supposed to be sympathetic, but now Aster is pulling the puppet strings to turn him into a monster. Why? What point is Aster trying to make? By the time the final orgy of violence hit the screen, I abandoned any hope that Eddington would ever reach any kind of coherence at all.
Aster himself has spoken of his characters as doomed by a larger force they don’t even recognize. The data center represents the big tech forces that, in Aster’s understanding, manipulate and control people. For Aster to make this point, his characters need to be mere puppets. Aster certainly talks of his characters that way, for example when he says, “There’s a way of looking at the film and saying all of those stories and all of these characters are now just training data. The movie itself is training data.” Given that character means nothing to Aster, and that he just wants to send character after character on a one-way trip to torture and death, why watch his movies?
In interviews, Aster tells us what Eddington’s point was meant to be. “We have to talk to each other,” he has said. Huh? You make a movie that includes no sympathetic characters, no redeeming ideology, no escape route out of a maze of constant hostility, and concludes with an orgy of violence using a variety of weapons, including a knife plunged into the main character’s skull, and your point is, “We need to talk to each other”? Baloney. Clearly if Eddington has any message it is that people are obnoxious and we must stockpile weapons for when inevitable societal breakdown occurs.
Aster says that he fears the power of AI and technology to crush the human. He says that giant tech corporations encourage us to spend too much time online, to renounce objective reality, and to enter into our own rabbit-hole conceptions of reality. Tech overlords, through the use of internet algorithms, shove people into rabbit holes, merely so that the tech overlords can gain more power.
Aster’s fear is widely shared. Several films this year have addressed similar themes. The HBO tragicomic satire, Mountainhead, was released in May, 2025. Tech overlords meet in a mountaintop mansion and celebrate their wealth and power. These amoral oligarchs are actively ruining the world in various ways. One of them is developing an AI program that allows users to spread inflammatory fake videos that spark worldwide societal breakdown.
Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, also released in May, 2025, revolves around the efforts of hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) to prevent The Entity, an AI system, from destroying life on earth.
The Liam Neeson / Pamela Anderson comedy The Naked Gun opened on July 28, 2025. A villainous tech overlord, Richard Cane, head of Edentech, possesses a device that he plans to use to cause humans to turn on each other violently. The population will drop and Cane and his fellow billionaires will wait out the turmoil in a bunker. They will emerge later to inherit the earth. The heroic Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson characters must stop Cane. Every one of these films, including The Naked Gun, handled big tech’s threat to humanity better than did Eddington.
Aster is concerned that big tech is crushing the human. Where are the humans in Eddington? Louise is meant to be a survivor of father-daughter incest. Aster says nothing worth hearing about incest. He uses Louise as a plot device. Louise is an underwritten, unattractive character. Viewers are not made to understand or to care about her victimization at the hands of her father. Louise mopes in bed, she wears baggy, ugly clothing, she makes weird dolls, rejects her husband, and believes in conspiracies. Aster endows Louise with no humanity. We don’t care about what happens to her. She’s just a loser whose major function in the film is to sexually frustrate her husband and tip this otherwise nice man into a killing spree. Joe Cross is the main character with the most screen time. He’s a tender, patient, devoted husband. He wants the townspeople to “free each other’s hearts.” He turns into a ruthless killer, willing to frame his underling Michael. This is never made believable. Aster wants to make a point, not honor a character.
Saturday Night Live alum Bill Hader interviewed Ari Aster about Eddington. Hader insisted that the film is a “masterpiece.” Hader says that Aster followed a prescription by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. “You present the problem, not the solution.” It’s not certain that Aster did present the problem. Reading online reviews, it’s clear that many viewers were not aware of Aster’s main idea, that the data center is the ultimate villain of the piece, and that the solution is that “we need to talk to each other.”
Anton Chekhov (1860 – 1904) did indeed say, “The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.” A comparison to Anton Chekhov does not flatter Ari Aster or Eddington. Chekhov wrote realistic works that captured everyday life in Russia. And Chekhov was a humanitarian. After his father’s bankruptcy, Chekhov supported his natal family. He became a physician and, in spite of his own lack of wealth, he treated thousands of poor patients for free. He traveled in primitive conditions thousands of miles to a notorious prison colony and also investigated the dire condition of Russian peasants. He wrote works based on both experiences, agitating for better conditions for prisoners and peasants. Scholar Simon Karlinsky says that Chekov’s life “was one continuous round of alleviating famine, fighting epidemics, building schools and public roads, endowing libraries, helping organize marine biology libraries, giving thousands of needy peasants free medical treatment, planting gardens, helping fledgling writers get published, raising funds for worthwhile causes, and hundreds of other pursuits designed to help his fellow man and improve the general quality of life around him.” Chekhov died at 44 from tuberculosis. In spite of his early death, he is considered one of the world’s greatest authors.
There were a couple of features of Eddington that I liked. I liked Aster’s satire of BLM demonstrators as shrill, clueless, and ineffectual. It took real courage to skewer such a pious, self-important, and powerful group. And Austin Butler lit up the screen as a demented internet conspiracy theorist.
Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.
