Funereal Plots
Horror Cinema reviews
Matthew M. Bartlett
Eddington
Writer/Director: Ari Aster
You might say that it’s a stretch to classify Eddington as horror. But. The writer/director is the visionary behind Hereditary. And it’s about a pandemic—a little more visceral than Outbreak and its ilk because Covid is not exactly in our rearview mirror. The official classification is Western/Thriller, and the designation thriller overlaps often with horror. Certainly there’s nothing supernatural here, but Eddington tackles the horrors that men can do when caught in unprecedented circumstances.
Eddington is horror adjacent.
Typically when one refers to an actor as “unrecognizable,” it’s in the context of a tabloid talking about someone who’s aged, or put on weight. In this case, Joaquin Phoenix is unrecognizable because he truly disappears into the role of Joe Cross, the town sheriff, who is baffled and angry about Mayor Garcia’s (Pedro Pascal) decision to implement a lockdown and mask mandate, when there haven’t yet been cases in the town. Cross’s wife is a conspiracy theorist and his wife suffers from mental illness.
The kids in the town, scandalized by the murder of George Floyd and enraptured by social media, stage somewhat confused protests, muddled by white guilt and helplessness. Some of them attend for prurient reasons. To complicate things further, Garcia has a history with Cross’s wife.
Every line uttered, every shot in this movie makes it clear that it’s pointing us toward cataclysmic violence. When Cross is pushed (as he sees it) too far, he lashes out in irreparable ways, tries to cover it up, and then is the victim of a terrorist squad posing as Antifa that flies in to heighten, well, everything.
Eddington covers a lot of ground, maybe too much. There’s the western element, there’s satire, there’s (yes) horror, there are cult leaders and there’s abuse and conspiracy theories and explosions that kill and maim. The movie lost me, frankly, when the terrorist squad was introduced. That, for me, pushed it beyond the up-to-then plausible, realistic story of a town driven to madness by a confluence of crises social, historical, and epidemiological, and into the realm of hyperbole, conspiracy, and, frankly, fantasy.
That and the expected cries of too soon aside, Eddington comes tantalizingly close to being the definitive, incisive fictional take on the events of the early 2020s. It’s unpredictable, scathing, and smart. It overshoots, sure, but that doesn’t take away from its achievements. This is one worth watching more than once, if just to savor Phoenix’s visceral performance of a man snagged and torn apart by history.
