[July 30, 2025] I’ve not posted a movie review here in ages, but I was compelled to do so by John Podhorotz’s interesting review of the movie Eddington. The film is billed as an American neo-Western black comedy. Set in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic in New Mexico, it follows the lives of those in a small town as they learn to cope with the many problems we all experienced.
John Podhorotz is a master at dissecting the movie’s satirical aspects, but it seems he has yet to decide whether this will be one of those rare classic satirical efforts, perhaps on the level of Voltaire. The entire review can be found here at this link in the Washington Free Beacon, dated July 26, 2025.
True satire is, by its very nature, emotionally unsatisfying, because the theme of satire is that there are no solutions to the low and fallen condition of human nature. Satire gives you no one to root for; every genius is a fool, every fool is a knave, and there is no transcendence to be had.
Writer-director Ari Aster’s new movie, Eddington, might be one of the signal works of satire in our time. I say “might be” because it’s just too soon to know whether this seemingly small-scale but actually sprawling account of how America went insane during the COVID epidemic will continue to resonate a few decades from now, when the memory of COVID no longer has the power to sting.
Eddington compresses the two-year-long American response to the pandemic into a few weeks in the late spring of 2020, just as it compresses America into the titular community in New Mexico. Eddington looks unpopulated, slapped up on a couple of streets like a new town in a John Ford western set in the aftermath of the Civil War. But it has just enough people to have masking wars, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, smashed storefronts, hypocritical politicians demanding others cover their faces while they meet unmasked in private, and the ever-present Internet putting everyone’s private life on public display. And then Antifa arrives.
The story centers on the town’s two leading figures. One is the sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), who seems like a good and overwhelmed man trying to figure out how to get through the day in a town divided. An asthmatic, he cannot bear wearing a mask, and as a libertarian of some sort, he cannot bear the fact that the governor of New Mexico has declared a “mandate” requiring masking. He cannot understand why his fellow townspeople have lost the ability to express even elementary kindness toward one another in a difficult time.
In this respect, the townspeople are more aligned with their mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is running for reelection by touting his closeness with the governor and a new and suspiciously incomprehensible green-friendly, AI-friendly office park that could have come straight out of the Inflation Reduction Act.
When Joe impulsively decides to run for mayor against Garcia on an anti-mandate, anti-masking ticket, the plot kicks into gear and then (if this is possible) methodically spins out of control.
Joe goes around town blaring his message through a car-top loudspeaker to streets emptied because of the pandemic. Garcia’s obnoxious son Eric rides by on a bike and points out that it’s lockdown and there’s no one outside to hear him. Meanwhile, Garcia yells at Eric for going to an outdoor gathering outlawed by the governor’s mandate because if word gets out, it will make him look bad.
Aster’s inspired conceit is to view with dispassion every possible angle on COVID. Masking is necessary—or it’s ridiculous. Paranoid hustling freaks on the Internet are seducing people with reckless theories—or maybe those theories are correct. Conservatives will believe in just about anything… or leftists will do just about anything. The black comic truth he establishes in Eddington is that people cut loose from the basic rules that govern how we live together can descend with startling rapidity into moral, spiritual, and homicidal psychosis.
Aster’s depiction of Eddington’s descent into the fever swamps of 2020 is often hilarious and always disturbing, as it should be. This is not a movie for which you will feel a fondness, but it becomes increasingly gripping and tense and concludes with a coda about how America emerged from the pandemic in a grievously wounded condition that is profoundly disturbing and entirely earned.
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EXCELLENT REVIEW
Wow, excellent review. I read the full original article. I also read other reviews that were not as kind. We all appreciate you sir for highlighting this new movie. I’ll not be seeing it at a theater but soon on tv.
Good one Gen. Satterfield. It may have been a long time since the last movie review, but this looks like a weird but good one.
Here’s a review that supports what you have to say, corralesdon.
“Eddington” would not be an Aster film if the solution to what ails them was not a complete bonkers fever dream of a solution at the one hour twenty-five-minute mark. Aster’s commitment to his bleak, sardonic vision of America may be exaggerated, but sadly not by much. His use of social media as an isolating, anti-film experience is conscious and deliberate. While it is a cutting and hilarious indictment on the human condition as much as the state of the nation, it does not take a lot of imagination to see the world as it is. Audiences are hungry for utopian movies who can imagine a better world than this.”
https://sarahgvincentviews.com/movies/eddington/
Josh Rosenberg wrote “Eddington doesn’t seek to provide the answers. But it might be the only film since the pandemic that understands that the current conflict in America has deeper roots for humanity’s problems than whether you vote red or blue.” And I agree.
Looks good to me. Alton I don’t like thinking about the follies of the Covid era.
A western? Nope. But the setting is very appropriate.
Robert Ebert.com gives it a 2.5 stars out of 4.
Ari Aster’s “Eddington” is a deliberately hollow provocation.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/eddington-movie-review-2025
It sets itself up as a statement on the chaos that took place in the summer of 2020, only to conclude that there is no explanation why much of humanity collapsed under the weight of conspiracy theories, mask debates, Black Lives Matter protests, and the rise of viral culture. You want to know how we got here? Tough shit. You never will. No one will.
I think Ebert.com is a too pessimistic.
I’m not much into Robert Ebert anymore. “He’s made a film about divided communities, and he hopes in his own way to do the same to his audience.” – Ebert. Naw. I’ll go watch it anyway.
Copilot Answer
Ari Aster’s “Eddington” is a provocative exploration of societal chaos during the COVID-19 pandemic, featuring strong performances from Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal, but it may leave viewers divided due to its tonal shifts and complex themes.
I was wondering when someone would come out with a Covid-19 movie and here we are. Yet, what I didn’t expect was the setting, a small town, many which struggled more than bog city folks where exceptions were made. Thank you Gen. Satterfield for “highlighting” this film.
Same here, Valkyrie. I usually don’t like to watch dark movies but I might make an exception in this case.