'Eddington' Review: Ari Aster’s Dive Into Pandemic Satire is a Sharp, Scathing, Hilarious and Horrific Portrayal of 2020
- Dan Bremner
- 2 minutes ago
- 4 min read
By Writer - , 2025
Film - Indie - Shorts - TV - Premium TV
Ari Aster’s latest has finally arrived (Once again, months after the US), loud, brash, unflinching, and completely unwilling to make you feel comfortable. I went in with uncertainty, as Hereditary and Midsommar floored me, while Beau is Afraid left me cold (though I owe it a rewatch). But Eddington? This has firmly thrown me back into the Aster camp. It’s a sharp, savage, and hilarious satire of the COVID-19 pandemic, set in the thick of 2020 when the world turned upside down and everyone suddenly became the worst version of themselves. Unlike many pandemic films that have tried (and failed) to capture the absurdity of those months, Eddington doesn’t aim for comfort or catharsis. Instead, it ridicules everyone: left, right, centre, conspiracists, mask zealots, BLM virtue signallers, Facebook doom-posters, and it does so with a fearless sense of humour that makes it far and away Aster’s funniest film.
What works immediately is how uncompromising it is. There’s no attempt at “both-sidesing” in the watered-down sense, there’s just a relentless mocking of every type of person who made 2020 unbearable. Anti-vax idiots, small-town sheriffs who thought masks were an affront to American liberty, Karens wiping down groceries while screaming at their neighbours, bored twenty-somethings who suddenly discovered BLM for about five minutes to look good on Instagram stories, it’s all here, and it’s all skewered. Aster’s screenplay reads like a time capsule of behaviours we all witnessed, rolled into an exaggerated but painfully recognisable whole. Unless you were living alone in a cabin with no internet, you will see someone you know reflected on screen, and chances are, you’ll laugh and cringe at the same time.
Joaquin Phoenix Leads a Stellar Cast in Eddington
At the centre of it all is Joaquin Phoenix, giving what might be one of his very best performances. His small-town sheriff is the kind of man who starts with righteous conviction but gradually deteriorates into a sickly, manic figure as the paranoia and hostility escalate. Watching him unravel is equal parts disturbing and hilarious, with Phoenix’s trademark intensity weaponised for pitch-black comedy. Pedro Pascal is a perfect foil as the mayor, smooth, calculating, and always two steps away from complete meltdown. Emma Stone and Austin Butler round out the core ensemble with brilliantly comic turns, while Deirdre O’Connell nearly steals the film as a conspiracy-obsessed mother-in-law whose scenes are so funny and so uncomfortably real they might be triggering for anyone who’s had a Facebook-addicted relative spouting “plandemic” nonsense at the dinner table.
It helps, too, that Eddington is visually stunning. Shot by Darius Khondji, the cinematography captures both the dusty Americana of a neo-Western and the suffocating paranoia of a thriller. Wide shots of deserted main streets and boarded-up businesses give the town a post-apocalyptic flavour, while close-ups linger on sweaty, anxious faces, amplifying the claustrophobia of enforced isolation. The visuals make the absurdity feel mythic, like a showdown in an old Western, but filtered through the lens of memes, hashtags, and nightly news briefings. Pair this with a score that swings between eerie ambience and manic percussion, and the film sustains a fever-dream energy that matches the chaos of the era.
What surprised me most is just how funny it is. Aster has always had a streak of dark humour, but here he leans fully into satire, delivering biting one-liners and absurd scenarios that keep undercutting the tension in ways that feel intentional rather than cheap. A town hall Zoom call that descends into bitching while the microphone is muted, teenagers staging Instagram-friendly protests and poorly explaining why, locals policing one another’s “6 feet” like petty dictators, these moments are staged with perfect comic timing, and yet they never feel far-fetched. If anything, they’re a little too close to reality, which is exactly why they work.
The film isn’t flawless. The third act, as ambitious as it is, does stumble slightly with pacing, there are stretches where you feel the runtime, and some will no doubt find the tonal lurches hard to swallow. But even at its messiest, it’s never boring. In fact, the sheer audacity of where the story goes in its final stretch is part of its charm. Without spoiling, Aster caps everything off with a punchline so bold and so funny that it made me want to watch it again almost immediately, reminding you that the whole thing was meant to sting, to amuse, and to expose just how absurd we all became when faced with a crisis we didn’t know how to handle.
It’s also worth noting how divisive this will be. If you see yourself in any of the archetypes lampooned here, and chances are you will (I'm sure most of us posted a black square on Instagram to pointless effect in 2020), you might take offense. That’s by design. Eddington isn’t a film about sympathy, it’s about mockery, about shining a light on the performative, hypocritical, and delusional behaviours that defined a bizarre moment in history. For those willing to laugh at themselves (and their neighbours), it’s brilliant. For those unwilling, it’ll feel like an attack. And honestly, that’s the mark of good satire.
Eddington as a Time Capsule of Pandemic Absurdity
Eddington is a bold, brutal, and hilarious time capsule of one of the strangest, ugliest, and most ridiculous chapters of recent history. Ari Aster has delivered something that feels both deeply of its moment and timeless in its skewering of human folly. It’s messy, yes, but deliberately so, because so was the world it’s portraying. Can't wait to see what Aster does next.
'Eddington' is out now in cinemas
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