 |
| FANTASIA |
FRANÇAIS app de traduction à gauche
 |
| EDDINGTON // FANTASIA |
Ari Aster’s Eddington is not merely a film. It is a scalding scrying mirror held up to America’s pandemic-era psyche, refracting its fractures into a kaleidoscope of dread, absurdity, and eerie moral exhaustion. Here is a Western that refuses the consolations of nostalgia, swapping horse-drawn heroism for an arid, sprawling desert city where the collective mind itself has become the frontier under siege.
It is set in Eddington, New Mexico, a town so hollowed out by lockdowns, conspiracy theories, and social unraveling that it resembles a dreamscape version of Twitter/X itself. Joaquin Phoenix stars as Joe Cross, the city’s sheriff, who trudges through dusty streets with unmasked defiance. Phoenix plays him with his signature wounded opacity: asthmatic, resentful, half-disintegrated under the sun, yet clinging to a ragged dignity. Joe is a man convinced of his own truth, even as the film never lets us know precisely what that truth is.
Pedro Pascal, as Mayor Ted Garcia, embodies the manicured charisma of a politician raised on media oxygen. Garcia’s veneer hides the scandal that once bound him to Joe in bitter enmity – his statutory seduction of Joe’s now-wife Louise (Emma Stone) two decades earlier. In Louise, Stone finds a tremulous sadness, as if her spirit has been bleached out by the sun and by years of mental fragility. When Austin Butler arrives, exuding reptilian serenity as Vernon, a cultish therapist to survivors of child sexual abuse, Louise is drawn away into his woozy promises of salvation, leaving Joe to confront his own unraveling. Butler’s Vernon seems less like a healer than an ideological parasite, implanting trauma as doctrine, salvation as identity erasure.
Aster, whose Beau Is Afraid verged on the solipsistic grotesque, here shows far greater discipline. His screenplay fuses thriller, satire, Western, and sociological horror with impressive tensile strength. This is a director obsessed with how reality itself dislocates under duress, and Eddington captures that dislocation in scenes of quiet, devastating absurdity: a father screaming at his teenage son for violating COVID gathering protocols by meeting six friends in a park; a sheriff’s office briefing dominated by confused debates over masking policy rather than the crime wave outside.
The set design is extraordinary. Every billboard, dust-choked storefront, abandoned office building, and lonely suburban porch is infused with pandemic-era detail, creating a sense of scrolling endlessly down X (Twitter), only to find yourself trapped within its algorithmic paranoia. The desert landscape, filmed with Darius Khondji’s bleached grandeur, is dotted with political placards – woke slogans, MAGA decals, anti-vax rants, BLM murals – until the townscape feels like America’s collective subconscious projected onto stucco walls and rusting fences.
What sets Eddington apart from didactic pandemic allegories is Aster’s refusal to treat any ideological faction as entirely sane or entirely monstrous. The local anti-racist youth activists are depicted as narcissists cosplaying revolution. The gun-toting conspiracy theorists, their paranoia only half-unfounded, blend genuine terror with incoherent authoritarianism. Even Big Tech’s looming data centre (a monolith labelled “solidgoldmagikarp” with Aster’s trademark sardonic whimsy) seems both villain and byproduct, exploiting a social media hallucination it did not invent but merely magnified for profit.
This is a film about moral absolutism metastasizing into addiction. Aster’s target is not “woke culture” or “Trumpism” alone but the hall-of-mirrors effect that social media confers on all belief systems, a collective madness wherein righteous rage becomes indistinguishable from derangement. The film’s tonal instability – its sudden veer from thriller to satire to tragedy – mirrors a culture with no centre left to hold it together.
The narrative’s pivot arrives when Joe challenges Garcia for mayor, driven not by ambition but a feral, shambolic desperation. Phoenix’s performance, though not among his greatest, radiates bitter poignancy. He is an aging lion too tired to roar, shuffling towards humiliation with pleading, blinking disbelief. The script permits him moments of near-comic haplessness, only to wrench the audience back into horror as his fragile sense of justice slides into indefensibility.
Aster extends his gaze to the George Floyd protests. Here, Eddington risks incendiary satire, depicting middle-class white activists as performative zealots more entranced by their moral self-image than the suffering they claim to redress. Michael Ward, as Michael, the Black cop caught between performative “saviours” and racist extremists, gives the film’s most quietly affecting performance. His calm, measured humanity is eventually swallowed in the same chaos as everyone else, underscoring Aster’s bleak thesis: no matter your identity or intention, the centre does not hold.
While Eddington is not horror in the supernatural sense, it is profoundly horrifying. The cultish therapy sessions Vernon leads evoke Midsommar’s communal nightmare logic, but instead of psychedelic Swedish meadows, we find the pale linoleum of New Mexican ranch kitchens. There is horror too in its portrayal of child sexual abuse – not graphic, but queasy in the way memory, trauma, and cultish identity-building merge into a single unbreakable pathology. The film asks: Is salvation, in modern America, simply a form of self-obliteration packaged as therapy?
Musically, Bobby Krlic and Daniel Pemberton’s score layers dirge-like cello drones over ominous synth pulses, a soundscape of paranoia rolling over sand dunes. Editor Lucian Johnston maintains an unnerving rhythm, scenes extending just past natural closure, unsettling the audience’s sense of narrative resolution.
Yet, the final act does become abstract, indulging Aster’s fascination with free-floating dread. Aster is still a filmmaker who risks overreaching into thematic sprawl. But in Eddington, unlike Beau Is Afraid, the excess feels proportionate to the nation’s own spiralling logic.
Ultimately, Eddington is a masterstroke of sociological cinema. It is Todd Field’s Tár transposed into the dust and dread of a pandemic Western; it is David Mamet reimagined without reactionary bravado but with Aster’s existential despair. It is an unflinching portrait of America’s pandemic-era fracture, less a commentary than a panoramic witness to its derangement.
When Joe Cross finally acts in violent desperation, we are left neither with catharsis nor horror’s traditional release. Instead, we feel only a quiet, trembling recognition of what it means to live where truth has become a frontier no lawman can patrol. In Eddington, Ari Aster captures a uniquely American madness – not a virus, not an ideology, but a psychic rift spreading silently beneath our feet, as vast and consuming as the desert itself.
Opening night at Fantasia July 16 2025
Opens everywhere July 18 2025
No comments:
Post a Comment