Wow. A lot to process and unpack. _Eddington_ received rapturous applause and huge moments of laughter at Sydney Film Festival. It’s chaotic, freewheeling and incredibly funny. Yes - it is Aster’s best film. Aster has made an unhinged social satire on the culture wars - the division, virtue signalling and general disingenuousness. And he does so with sub-machine gun precision, much like the one that appears in the final act. Aster’s is a scattershot approach, rife with motif and self-aware savagery. No one is safe - right-wingers get both barrels, but the resulting shrapnel hits a lot of attention-seeking privileged white kids. Ideologies fester in the microcosm of the small titular New Mexican town, the fever and sweats mirrored by the Covid that slowly takes hold of our main character. Someone once said “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” and certainly proves true in this bleak comedy. We’re not completely through the chaos satirised in Aster’s fourth feature. Not by a very long shot. But this neo-Western, with assured insanity, turns a mirror to our modern war of shouting-over-listening, and poses the question, “Guys, what the fuck are we doing?”

Whilst Joaquin Phoenix delivers one of his usually characterful efforts here, the rest of this film is a fairly muddled attempt at a western with a fairly weak underpinning story. He’s the bronchially-challenged sheriff “Cross” who is at odds with the town’s mayor “Ted” (the rapidly becoming ubiquitous in 2025 Pedro Pascal) in a small New Mexican town. It’s election time, and the latter man is standing for another term when an incident in their town that is rapidly becoming under-policed encourages “Cross” to stand for office, too. Over the next couple of hours, we discover just what the source of this long-standing grudge is all set against a background of COVID safety precautions, his unhappy marriage with “Lou” (Emma Stone) and a barely tolerant one with mother-in-law “Dawn” (Deirdre O’Connell) that explains much of the attitudes of a lawman coasting through life. Big business is coming the town’s way. There are plans to build one of those colossal great data centres bringing jobs and prosperity to the town - well that’s what it says on the tin, but will it deliver in it’s promise for the local community? The ramifications of the recent Minneapolis killing of George Floyd is sending further ripples of dissent through their township - and he has neither the physical nor intellectual resources to deal with these issues. With tensions mounting and him reaching the end of his tether, is he going to snap? Perhaps this might resonate more with an American small-town mentality, and it does have the odd scenario that presents some dark humour - usually in the form of questioning the whole mask-wearing culture or the right to protest in the middle of the street, but it only really comes alive in the last ten minutes and by then I must confess to not being especially bothered about any of these people, nor their predicament. It takes a swipe provincial politics but not in an especially innovate fashion and it takes far too long to get off the ground. Pascal is master of the less-is-more style of presentation, but here he brings very little to a lacklustre party that casts its net wide, but that has has too many holes as it depends on Phoenix to enliven something that I found largely uninteresting. Sorry, not for me.