The audience made barely a sound for almost 2½ hours at Friday’s premiere of Ari Aster’s slow-then-deranged American political horror story “Eddington.” No laughing. No gasping. Just silence, watching the A24-anointed director’s dark comedy, set in small-town New Mexico at the start of the pandemic, in which a personal feud between the MAGA-coded sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and the liberal mayor (Pedro Pascal) turns into a culture war over mask mandates — and then actual war.
Many rose, applauding and cheering, as the lights came up. Others joined the handful who’d walked out mid-screening and fled for the door. (The attrition rate, we heard, was much higher in the simultaneous press screening.) Aster is an ambitious filmmaker known for challenging his audience’s limits in psychological horror films like “Midsommar,” “Hereditary” and “Beau Is Afraid.”
And in “Eddington” — in which the town (pop. 2,465) gets overrun with Black Lives Matter protests and becomes the center of multiple online scandals — lengthy world-building gives way to plot twists involving gunfights, conspiracy theories and antifa that are so insane, the fun of the movie becomes wondering just how off the rails it can get.
Were people at the Cannes premiere riveted? Stunned? Even Aster couldn’t tell.
“I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what you think,” Aster said, to laughter, in his standing ovation remarks. “It’s a great privilege to be here, a dream come true. Thank you so much for having me. I don’t know. Sorry?”
Like the fictional small town in “Eddington,” Cannes is divided. Some found Aster’s film a brilliant social critique, others a painful, pointless slog. The satire takes place during the covid-19 pandemic, but this is just the trigger for deadly misunderstandings in a community and country that has lost sight of the truth. Several international journalists told me they found it way too specific in its American and New Mexican references and that it won’t play well overseas.
The Guardian called it “tedious” and “weirdly self-important.” Variety found it “bracingly outside-of-the-box,” praising in particular Phoenix’s turn as an incompetent right-wing sheriff. Willmore described it as “centerless” in Vulture but found herself (“Sirât”-like!) on a bridge between admiration and hatred: “I didn’t love it — I’m honestly not sure I’d even say I liked it — but it gets at the way our shared reality fractured in ways that may be irreparable, leaving a situation ripe for grifters and opportunists to step in and take over.”
Whatever their opinions, it has people talking.
