Culture
Hindsight is 2020, or America as a Diagnosis
July 19, 2025
- Mariia KiriukhinaFilm critic
Mariia Kiriukhina reviews the Cannes Main Competition contestant "Eddington" by Ari Aster.
Eddington is the first Aster film in which the monsters are not phantasmagoric but recognisable: the sheriff of a small New Mexico town who refuses to wear a mask; a mayor with liberal rhetoric and dark secrets; a wife suspended between the two of them like a pendulum in a clock that has been taken apart; a pandemic as the catalyst for everything that had long been rotting anyway.
May 2020 — a time that we seem, collectively, to have agreed to remember indistinctly. Aster refuses this agreement. Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) does not wear a mask not because he is evil and not because he is stupid. He does not wear a mask because the mask is the first public acknowledgement that the world has changed, and Joe has staked his life on the conviction that it would not. This is an existential wager, and Aster treats it with seriousness — which cannot be said of most directors who have approached the COVID subject from the position of "we are smarter than those who didn't wear masks."
Phoenix is the chief reason to watch Eddington. He plays a man with a minimum reserve of rightness and a maximum reserve of conviction — a combination Aster develops with an almost anthropological precision. The confrontation with Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) is a conflict between two ways of managing reality at a moment when reality cannot be managed. The mayor believes in institutions. The sheriff believes in himself. They are both wrong — and both right simultaneously. Aster refuses to judge — and this is his central artistic position, one that provokes irritation in some critics and admiration in others.
The film is alive for its first eighty minutes — genuinely alive, with that bitter precision of small domestic catastrophes that distinguishes American independent cinema at its best. An emptied-out town, boarded-up shopfronts, conspiracy posts on Facebook that the old mother-in-law reads aloud with the intonation of Scripture. Darius Khondji — the cinematographer of Uncut Gems and The Immigrant — treats space as document: every frame could hang in a museum as a photograph of an era.
But at roughly the one-hour-forty mark the film begins to trip over its own ambition. Aster wants to say too much at once: the pandemic and racism, conspiracy theory and political polarisation, the trauma of abandonment and violence as the language of those who have forgotten how to speak in words. Each of these stories deserves its own film — here they compete for screen time and lose on every front. Emma Stone as the wife, who clearly has some history with the mayor — a dark and important history — exists in the film as an unclosed file: opened, glimpsed, forgotten open.
The finale — explosive, almost Western in spirit — is honest with respect to the logic of everything that precedes it: if chaos is the primary habitat, then chaos is what everything must end in.
And yet Eddington is a film without which the conversation about 2025 will be incomplete. Not because it is great, but because it is the only one that does not pretend to understand how we arrived at a particular point of being. Everyone else understands. Aster does not understand — but is honest about his incomprehension. In a world of victorious narratives and agreed-upon versions of reality, this is itself a rarity, almost a virtue, almost sufficient grounds for a Palme d'Or. Almost.
May 2020 — a time that we seem, collectively, to have agreed to remember indistinctly. Aster refuses this agreement. Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) does not wear a mask not because he is evil and not because he is stupid. He does not wear a mask because the mask is the first public acknowledgement that the world has changed, and Joe has staked his life on the conviction that it would not. This is an existential wager, and Aster treats it with seriousness — which cannot be said of most directors who have approached the COVID subject from the position of "we are smarter than those who didn't wear masks."
Phoenix is the chief reason to watch Eddington. He plays a man with a minimum reserve of rightness and a maximum reserve of conviction — a combination Aster develops with an almost anthropological precision. The confrontation with Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) is a conflict between two ways of managing reality at a moment when reality cannot be managed. The mayor believes in institutions. The sheriff believes in himself. They are both wrong — and both right simultaneously. Aster refuses to judge — and this is his central artistic position, one that provokes irritation in some critics and admiration in others.
The film is alive for its first eighty minutes — genuinely alive, with that bitter precision of small domestic catastrophes that distinguishes American independent cinema at its best. An emptied-out town, boarded-up shopfronts, conspiracy posts on Facebook that the old mother-in-law reads aloud with the intonation of Scripture. Darius Khondji — the cinematographer of Uncut Gems and The Immigrant — treats space as document: every frame could hang in a museum as a photograph of an era.
But at roughly the one-hour-forty mark the film begins to trip over its own ambition. Aster wants to say too much at once: the pandemic and racism, conspiracy theory and political polarisation, the trauma of abandonment and violence as the language of those who have forgotten how to speak in words. Each of these stories deserves its own film — here they compete for screen time and lose on every front. Emma Stone as the wife, who clearly has some history with the mayor — a dark and important history — exists in the film as an unclosed file: opened, glimpsed, forgotten open.
The finale — explosive, almost Western in spirit — is honest with respect to the logic of everything that precedes it: if chaos is the primary habitat, then chaos is what everything must end in.
And yet Eddington is a film without which the conversation about 2025 will be incomplete. Not because it is great, but because it is the only one that does not pretend to understand how we arrived at a particular point of being. Everyone else understands. Aster does not understand — but is honest about his incomprehension. In a world of victorious narratives and agreed-upon versions of reality, this is itself a rarity, almost a virtue, almost sufficient grounds for a Palme d'Or. Almost.
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