Eddington (2025) Review: Ari Aster’s Grand Conspiracy Thriller Misses the Mark

Ari Aster’s Eddington continues a concerning trend among 2025’s major offerings, a growing list of prestige directors losing the throughline of their films through their own ambition. Aster ( Midsommar, Beau is Afraid) swings for a paranoid, post-pandemic epic full of grand commentary, but gets lost in abstraction and tonal confusion. Despite strong performances, Eddington fails to decide whether it wants to satirize, empathize with, or indict conspiracy thinking, and collapses under that indecision. It's at least a half hour too long, peaks at about the two-thirds point and doesn't know what to do from there, culminating in an over-the-top ending that feels like a forced escape. Eddington starts as a satire just a degree or two from reality, in which country sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) fights both pandemic restrictions and home life riddled with mental illness and trauma. From the beginning, though, Aster muddies the water by blending the craziness of COVID with th

by Robert Book and Bradley Paul Gee · source ↗