REEL | Joaquin Phoenix Unmasks 'Eddington' x Fantasia 2025

"Are you f*cking retarded? […] You're white!"

Fantasia International Film Festival

Ari Aster, the master of contemporary anxiety horror, dives into the treacherous waters of the recent global pandemic in his divisive satirical neo-Western, Eddington. Told through bleak dark comedy, the film is firmly set in May 2020 in the titular fictional small desert New Mexico town during a combative mayoral election as it explores how trying times have put their microcosm stand-in for America as a whole on the brink.

It stars Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal as the candidates, a gun-totting but ineffectual cowboy sheriff strongman and the charismatic Latino political operative incumbent, who are both struggling to keep their town running amidst the lockdown and strict health protocols to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, all while socially-conscious protests against racial injustice start to break out. Phoenix's full arc mirrors the reckoning, backlash, and radicalization that a broken American society churned through at a accelerated rate since the virus' first wave.

Despite the tight focus on the small town and its scant inhabitants, the impressive cast sparkles with interesting turns that strongly echo elements of the United States' rapid decline, further leading down a dark rabbit hole of chaos. A stripped-down Emma Stone plays against type as Phoenix's largely victimized, ghostly but rebellious wife who becomes seduced by a pedophile-obsessed cult leader (Austin Butler). This leads to the sheriff's desperate breakdown against the town he's supposedly trying to protect at all costs to him personally.

Eddington chaotically tries to explain how and why we live the way we do today, including being terminally online and resorting to violent solutions to our problems, as a result of the shared but unprocessed trauma of COVID-19. By using classic American Western tropes in a fractured modern political setting, it expresses the full weight of characters' actions under immense pressure as a cauldron of broadly satirical conflict between neighbours and shared communities unable to share common realities. It's a performative powder keg of paranoid prejudice and conspiratorial unrest.

Eddington screened as the opening film of the 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal.


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