In the half-decade since the COVID-19 pandemic began, many have tried to make films capturing what it was really like, but few have failed to grasp exactly how the pandemic really changed things. Not just in a social-distancing, health-conscious way, but in the way society was fundamentally altered by being forced indoors and left to and with their own devices as millions around the world died.

Paranoid conspiracy thinking, inter-community hostility, and generally batshit behavior were already on the rise, but COVID was the trigger that accelerated it further, replacing anything resembling a normal society with a perma-divide that formed a chasm in the middle of common ground. Ari Aster's feels like the first movie about the pandemic to really understand this, or at least try to, and though it is flawed, it's another born-to-be-divisive film from the mind behind Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau is Afraid.

Eddington is Joaquin Phoenix's movie through and through - he plays Sheriff Joe Cross, a polarizing figure in the small New Mexico town he lives in with his wife Louise (Emma Stone) and his mother-in-law/permanent house guest Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell). He's anti-mask and pro-conspiracy, his life soundtracked by galaxy-brained podcasts and constant nagging from Dawn, whose dead husband Joe inherited the role of sheriff from.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal, underutilized), whose positive demeanor and pro-masking beliefs clearly irk Joe, though there's something deeper there, too. Eddington is, in part, about an ideological standoff between the community leaders, set against the backdrop of the early pandemic days when the Black Lives Matter protests swept a country that had previously been confined to their houses.

From there, though, Eddington becomes a sprawling and unflinching portrait of what America was and would soon become as political campaigns, unrest, and, eventually, murder and a firestorm of bullets rain down all hell in the middle of the desert. Eddington is likely to give you whiplash, both because of the wild turns it takes in its story and the ground it tries to cover in its social commentary, encompassing everything from white privilege to relations with indigenous tribes and insidious religion and conspiracy theories.

At times, it can be bitterly hysterical, with Aster, who also wrote the film, further flexing his comedic muscles after his previous film with Phoenix. On the other hand, Eddington can be almost too on-the-nose, knicking the surface of complex issues but pulling the blade away before it can really draw blood.

Aster uses the framework of a classic Western to tell parts of this story before going full No Country For Old Men by way of The Expendables, which is when things get truly insane. If anything, Eddington deserves to be admired for its willingness to touch subjects that many wouldn't with a ten-foot pole and when it hits, it really hits.

From Austin Butler's shifty pseudo-pastor to a local boy who dips his toes in activism for the affections of a girl, Aster fleshes out the town of Eddington with memorable characters who all have their own roles to play with mostly satisfying payoffs. Still, it's almost too big of a tapestry for the director, with Eddington's two-and-a-half-hour runtime somehow feeling too slight to tie everything together in the end.

The film is almost certain to spark a new dialogue about the aftershocks of the pandemic and, on a cinematic level, it's grappling with reality in a way that is both deeply uncomfortable and somehow still palatable. Looking back at pandemic era films, we should at least be thankful that we're no longer getting served up COVID movies like the severely misguided (and released way-too-soon) horror Songbird, which itself would serve as the source of a conspiracy theory for many citizens of Eddington, or the painfully unfunny Netflix feature The Bubble.

Instead, Aster tries to say something new in Eddington, and though he doesn't at all turns, he fits plenty of well-placed jabs into one film that makes it so we're watching a well-constructed diagram of our very disturbing reality. Eddington doesn't have the same stylistic flourishes of his previous work, but Aster, who began with deeply unsettling horror movies like Hereditary and Midsommar, is dealing in a different kind of fear, one that hits close to home. Yet, in trying to evoke the divisiveness of the world post-pandemic, Aster has perhaps made the most down-the-middle movie of his career yet.

premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It will release in theaters on July 18.