MASKING FOR TROUBLE

“Eddington” is a slog, but a slog with ambitions—and its director and screenwriter, Ari Aster, is savvy enough to cultivate an air of mystery about what those ambitions are.

- JUSTIN CHANG

Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal star in Ari Aster's film.

His earlier chillers, “Hereditary” (2018) and “Midsommar” (2019), had their labyrinthine ambiguities, too, but they also had propulsive craft and cunning, plus a resolute commitment to scaring us stupid.

Then came the ungainly “Beau Is Afraid” (2023), a cavalcade of Oedipal neuroses both showy and coy, in which Aster didn’t seem to lose focus so much as sacrifice it on the altar of auteurism. With “Eddington,” his high-minded unravelling continues. No longer a horror wunderkind, Aster, at thirty-nine, yearns to be an impish anatomist of the body politic. The times grow worse and worse; must his movies follow suit?

“Eddington” cycles through genres with a deliberate yet half-distracted air, as if the very conventions of narrative have become caught in a feedback loop. The film has the dust of a Western, the snark of a satire, the violence of a thriller, the nihilism of a noir, and the bloat of an epic. It also has the stale taste of yesterday’s headlines, peering backward, as it does, to the early days of COVID-19. Aster’s subject is nothing less than the void of meaning—the morass of misinformation and irreconcilable political rancor—into which America has tumbled since the pandemic. The isolated, polarized way we live now, he insists, can be traced back to the misery of how we lived then.