A MOVIE ABOUT THE YEAR THE US WENT BERSERK

In the early days of Covid, people grasping for precedents started reading up on the Spanish flu, the calamitous pandemic that began in 1918 and is thought to have killed 50 million people worldwide.

- Michelle Goldberg

But unlike those wars, it didn’t leave much of a cultural mark. At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, I remember finding this puzzling. When it was finally over, it made perfect sense. Having slogged through something hideous, many of us were desperate to move on. There have been a few Covid novels, a handful of mostly forgettable movies and one truly great contemporaneous comedy special, Bo Burnham's Inside.

That's why I was so excited to see Ari Aster's new movie, Eddington, the first film I know of to really capture what it was like to be alive during the year America cracked up. A director best known for his berserk horror movies — especially the lurid, hallucinatory Midsommar — he's well suited to tackling the nightmare of our national descent. During the pandemic, Aster told me, “I was in a state of anxiety and constant dread. I still am now. It’s worse than it was, and that’s sort of the state that I was in while I was writing the script and making the film”.