Love him or hate him, nobody can ever accuse Ari Aster of shying away from discomfort.

The writer/director first attracted industry attention for “The Strange Thing About the Johnsons,” a short film about father-son incest. Then came his feature debut “Hereditary,” with one of the most grotesquely shocking twists of the 21st century, and an eventual box-office phenomenon. For anyone who’s ever felt even a twinge of anxiety, the brilliant depravity of “Beau Is Afraid” requires no further elaboration.

To fall back on one of horror marketing’s favorite cliches, the man has a twisted mind. But when he fled his New York home to be closer to family in New Mexico during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Aster began to see things that even he found disturbing. As the virus shoved everyone deeper into our own digital rabbit holes, with algorithms spoon-feeding us content designed to affirm our own grievances and demonize the concerns of anyone whose needs and desires might be standing in our way, a level of human barbarity rivaling anything in Aster’s movies began to emerge in everyday life. It became clear that the pandemic’s real legacy in America wouldn’t be one of public health, but of irreparable damage to the country’s social fabric.

“I don’t think we have been able to metabolize just how seismic that was and what it did, but I think we’re still living out the consequences of it, and we’re still living in the process of it,” Aster said during a recent conversation with IndieWire. “I also don’t think that was the advent of anything. I don’t think that was the beginning of anything. I think it was an inflection point. But I do think it was the moment at which the last link to whatever that old world was was cut for good. And by ‘for good,’ I mean forever.”

Aster was already committed to shooting “Beau Is Afraid” as his next project, but he realized what he was witnessing needed to be documented. He spent three weeks in June 2020 hastily writing a script incorporating elements of a contemporary Western, which he had tried to make before “Hereditary,” into real-time COVID paranoia. He put the script aside once it became safe to start shooting “Beau Is Afraid,” then began seriously revisiting it after that film was released.

The result was “Eddington,” an early frontrunner for the title of 2025’s most divisive film. Set in an eponymous small town in New Mexico during May 2020, the film follows a sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) who becomes outraged by a mask mandate enforced by the town’s slick progressive mayor (Pedro Pascal), who may or may not have a history with his wife (Emma Stone). Sheriff Cross’ entry into the town’s mayoral race disrupts everything from local politics to his own struggling marriage, and an overflowing well of directionless anger turns the town into a political war zone when anti-mask sentiments and Black Lives Matter protests intersect.

The film manages to cram a multitude of hot-button issues into its two-and-a-half-hour running time, including social media disinformation, racism in law enforcement, Native American reservation politics, Big Tech hegemony, and the cult-like racial guilt that so many white progressives performatively espoused in 2020. There’s something to piss off everyone, but it’s all in service of Aster’s larger point that the pandemic was the final domino that drove us insane.

At this point in his career, Aster breathes the most rarified filmmaking air on the planet. The amount of indie auteurs on his level can be counted on one hand — though I mentioned to him that many of those peers are currently devoting their efforts to period pieces, while Aster spends his days making films about a present that everyone else wants to escape.

“I certainly understand the appeal of retreating into the past, because the present is so oppressive,” Aster said. “But I’m hungry for more work that is reflecting where we are because, to use a platitude, these are unprecedented times, and our nose is up against the glass. So it’s very hard to see exactly where we are in the trajectory of things. But I do feel that the human capacity for adaptation is amazing and that things normalize very quickly. They become ambient. And when things do become ambient, they stop being so obvious. But things are very weird right now.”

I ask Aster if he sees any reason to be hopeful that the problems he outlines in “Eddington” — people living in separate digital realities and seeing the worst in each other before inevitably turning to violence — are solvable. He pauses for what seems like an eternity before offering an answer that appears to be aimed at convincing himself as much as me.

“I’m always looking for it, and I’m desperate for it,” he said. “And this is a platitude, sort of, but it also feels true. I think the only hope is in kind of re-engaging with each other and finding a way to reconnect, which I think the first step of that has to be to reach out. And so what would an olive branch look like in that case? But I think part of the key is in finding a way to see and maybe remember that our neighbors are not our enemy.”

An A24 release, “Eddington” opens in theaters on Friday, July 18.