Ari Aster wants us to relive COVID dread — but we never left

The only way out is through. Unless, of course, you choose to take a seat and stay a while. And in his latest film, “Eddington,” writer-director Ari Aster invites you for an extended stay in the fictional New Mexico town, where viewers can reopen old wounds and sink back into the trauma they’ve worked so hard to outrun.

In the picturesque community of Eddington, among the tawny deserts and quaint antique shops, things are quickly coming apart at the seams during the final weeks of May 2020. Yes, that May 2020, the very same one that you and I barely made it out of with our sanity intact. For a provocateur like Aster, who has made a name for himself decapitating teenagers and giving audiences a front row seat to ritual solstice suicides, peak COVID-era chaos almost seems like low-hanging fruit. Naturally, there is stomach-churning anxiety to be dredged up from this period — one that we’re very much still living in, in many ways — as Aster noted during a talk following the film’s New York premiere. Even five years on, the sight of someone proudly maskless inside a grocery store during a time of mask mandates is familiarly disheartening, made even more acutely so by the fact that, in the half-decade since the film’s fictional events, heartless self-importance has become de rigueur.

With “Eddington,” Aster attempts to chronicle how we reached this moment, holding a speedometer to the commotion and tracking how quickly it all fell apart. Alongside stars Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal, the director crafts his unique vision of a contemporary Western, as the two men battle it out amid mask wars, Black Lives Matter protests, police violence, and a growing sense of neighborly distrust that pervades the city. But nothing Aster presents here is a particularly new or novel idea. Rather, he’s more interested in playing the spectator, studying and characterizing to deliver a portrait of insanity that feels irrefutably true, yet entirely empty. Aster uses veracity to dig into his audience’s skin, conjuring memories that most have spent the last five years distancing themselves from, without presenting any practical solutions for this unearthed trauma. The film certainly looks and functions better than the average piece of COVID media, but it rings just as self-serving, more of an exercise in anxiety management for its creator than something with tangible meaning for the viewer. If anything, “Eddington” is a grim reminder that we’re still caught in the clutches of the mass delusion and violence that COVID wrought. Until we wriggle free, all we can do is document.

The problem with revisiting a period as specific as May 2020 is that it was documented in real time. In those weeks immediately following initial pandemic lockdowns, most of us were left with little to do other than sit on our couches and check our phones. These small screens were charged with holding the entire world, and the more short-form video content and breaking news articles we consumed, the less nuance there was to grasp. When the virus forced us to disconnect from our fellow humans and plug our brains into technology to keep pandemic anxiety at bay, we lost the ability to intimate the subtleties of reality. Everyone was angry, stripped of control and looking for someone to blame. Suddenly, we found ourselves living in a reality where an Instagram post could serve as substantive evidence of malfeasance. A person’s character was determined in the length of an afternoon by a jury of peers gathering in the comments section to deliberate.

An unlearning of this scale begs to be satirized. And to his credit, Aster’s film is wryly perceptive, unflinching in the way it lampoons both the right and the left, the maskless and the socially distanced. Aster is careful not to pass judgment or overtly proselytize, favoring a mode of storytelling that gets as close to the truth as possible while leading with objectivity. But because Aster is reluctant to make a statement, “Eddington” functions as a gallery wall of images that we’re closely familiar with, but that have no point of view or affecting artistry. The film is content with merely revisiting the recent past like a slideshow, flicking through each memory, asking, “Wasn’t that crazy?” What begins as an unsettling but compelling walk down memory lane quickly becomes a slog toward the inevitable. No one wants to watch a PowerPoint for two and a half hours, even if every fourth slide earns a modest chuckle. (Ironically, that’s probably a result of nagging Zoom fatigue.)

What Aster does manage that most COVID media, besides 2024’s similarly themed but more uniquely incendiary film “Stress Positions,” doesn’t is a perceptive take on how easily kindness and empathy were misdefined. At the movie’s outset, Eddington Sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix) refuses to wear his face covering despite the recent mask mandate, sticking up for his fellow anti-maskers, townspeople whose names he knows by heart. Being asthmatic, Joe jumps to the defense of a local senior who refuses to mask before entering a grocery store, claiming that it’s too hard for him to breathe in the mask. Aster trusts that the viewer knows this is absurd; any asthmatic should understand that a virus like COVID would affect an immunocompromised person much more violently than 20 minutes wearing a face covering inside. But for Joe, illness isn’t the issue; this is about small-town hospitality and local customs. COVID is a harbinger of change that Joe has no power over, and the lack of control makes him feel small and unimportant in his own being, an insecurity reflected by his squeaky voice and diminutive stance. While it would be considerate to think about a neighbor’s safety and mask up, real empathy demands decentering the ego, and that’s something Joe is incapable of, going so far as to position himself as a champion of small-town compassion.

“How did we get here, and is it worth the cost of being at war with your neighbors?” Joe asks during a Facebook livestream following the incident at the grocery store. “You can ruin a man’s day, or you can do the right thing and be kind.” In this instance, and so many others during the height of the pandemic, kindness is relative. People like Joe were asked to give a damn about their fellow humans, and for a shocking number of them, that request was untenable. The pandemic swiftly reminded us of just how many people couldn’t care less about those they share this planet with, an underbelly of casual animosity that was already revealed by Donald Trump’s first election. In “Eddington,” the town’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pascal), actively fights against the spread of this antipathy, much to Joe’s chagrin. Soon, the two are engaged in a race for the mayorship and an even more pressing competition to see who can most frequently align themselves with the changing views of Eddington’s residents. Like the chronic posting that filled social media feeds in the summer of 2020, a good chunk of their rivalry is hollow posturing. In the battle between being radical and being correct, no one accepts defeat.

Perhaps there’s something to be said about Aster’s intelligence in this matter. More than many other filmmakers who have tried to wrangle this era and condense it into something astute, he is keenly aware that’s not possible. It’s not that he’s so desperately trying to say something with “Eddington,” but rather that he knows there is nothing to say that hasn’t already been said, felt and experienced by everyone in the world firsthand. The film exists as a record of time, and a scathingly accurate one at that. But, to what end? How many times will filmmakers review and recreate the intricacies of this specific era before realizing that simply reproducing mass trauma is an ineffective mode of satire? It seems that everyone’s got something to say, but rarely does anyone manage to spit anything out. Aster’s modus operandi, holding strong following his first three features, is to smother the viewer, piling on so many narrative threads that it becomes difficult to claw free for a broader perspective. One might argue that’s Aster’s intention, to create an atmosphere as exhausting and suffocating as the one we endured just scrolling on our phones in 2020. But we’ve seen this trick before — hell, we lived it — and once you know how it’s performed, the novelty wears off fast.

Start your day with essential news from Salon.Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Following the film’s premiere, Aster admitted that the idea for the movie was born out of “living in a state of constant dread.” That’s not exactly unconventional for one of his movies, but more than any of his other features, this film is laced with Aster’s neuroses. Often, “Eddington” plays out so formally and predictably that it’s like watching someone write out the thing that’s making them anxious on paper, word for word. The problem is that a fair number of people have already mapped out this entire era, crumpled up that paper, and thrown it from an imaginary three-point line into a trash bin, accepting that humanity may have endured an irreversible pivot away from empathy and toward self-righteousness. It’s not that those people are running from reality or pretending COVID never happened; they simply understand that staying glued to sheer disbelief is unproductive. After being forced to spend most of 2020 and 2021 feeling helpless and ineffective, why waste any more time than is necessary dwelling on those emotions? COVID remains a harrowing reminder of life’s ephemerality. This existence is impermanent; why spend it as a broken record?

Had Aster taken the plunge and tried to point some way forward, free from this mess he feels so caught up in, “Eddington” might serve as a bold (if debatably impractical) look at a potential future. But, like the rest of us, Aster has no solutions. Filmmakers are not politicians, nor should they be required or expected to have the answers to problems they wish to explore. But with a dread as globally pervasive as the one COVID created, light situational humor and undeniable precision aren’t enough to pull an audience out of their shared despondency, even for a second. By pathologizing without a plan of action, “Eddington” is as effective as an influencer’s Instagram carousel with 10 rambling slides about “everything going on right now.” Aster just wants to be part of the conversation, but sometimes, the best thing you can do is sit back and listen.