Ari Aster hits it again.

Ari Aster is 100% a director. He makes movies, releases them in theaters, and people go watch them. Ari Aster also seems to love Joaquin Phoenix, and has put him his recent movies. A lot of people love his movies, and a lot of people hate them. Eddington is currently one of the few films where critics and audiences are basically in complete agreement on their opinions. Last night when I checked the score was straight up 67:67, and today (Saturday) it is 67:64.

Directed by Ari Aster and written by Ari Aster, Eddington is a film set in the town of Eddington, New Mexico in the middle of COVID in 2020. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as Joe Cross, the sheriff who finds himself growing discontent with the government thanks to the harsh lockdown procedures despite Covid evidently not existing in the town at that point. This puts him at increasing odds with the town’s mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) who himself is getting at odds with the town over his enthusiastic approval of a new AI datacenter that may or may not be gearing up to suck up the town’s water supply.

Eddington has a pretty great cast and some interesting characters that get wholly underused throughout the movie. Emma Stone plays Joe’s wife Louise, who makes arts and crafts as a hobby and sells them online. Joe wants to start a family but it’s obvious Louise is extremely touch-averse going back to a trauma from her youth. It also seems like Joe might not be the right person to help her overcome her trauma. Currently living with them in lockdown is her mother Dawn played by Deirdre O’Connell and I love Deirdre O’Connell as an actress. Dawn is a representation of the people who went down the extreme conspiracy rabbit hole during Covid, printing out endless reams of paper about how the Titanic was an inside job and watching number-based conspiracy videos on YouTube.

Austin Butler plays Vernon, a hippy cult leader who seems to partially represent the QAnon group with his commentary on secret pedophile rings operating out of restaurants. When George Floyd is killed in the movie’s timeline, it creates a rift in Joe’s already troubled Sheriff’s department as Black Lives Matter descends on Eddington. His one deputy Guy (Luke Grimes) reveals himself to be kind of a racist asshole, while his other deputy Michael (Micheal Ward) develops an internal struggle with being black and representing an institution that is supported by the KKK. The Sheriff’s office is also at odds with the officers from the Pueblo Tribe.

Perhaps the most on the nose character is Brian (Cameron Mann), a white teenage boy who suddenly gets really into political activism and shouts about white guilt and oppression. Not because he actually cares about the cause, but because the girl he’s crushing on, Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), cares about those things and he wants to look good for her so she’ll maybe sit on his face one day. There are not a lot of subtleties in this film, including one point where in order to convey that the situation is out of hand, a literal dumpster is set on fire. Antifa is also shown as this weirdly well-funded paramilitary organization.

Eddington sets up a fair number of storylines, and you might be wondering if a two and a half hour film can take all those threads and wrap them each up nicely. And the answer is no, it doesn’t. Many of the storylines just say “screw it” and end abruptly with nothing to tie them up or poor conclusions. A good amount of the film follows the rising tensions between Joe and Ted as Joe announces he’s running for mayor and coming for Ted’s job, and it’s obvious the drama between the two goes further than just politics.

Eddington has too much going on, like Ari Aster set up a whiteboard and just started adding topics to comment on without realizing that the film had to eventually end. It’s making a lot of comments about a lot of different things and ultimately not doing any of it with particular grace or clarity.

Did I enjoy Eddington? Does anyone really enjoy Ari Aster films? I feel like it’s a measure of how you digest the ick after watching his movies, and I say that having given Beau is Afraid a B+. It has a lot of moments that are going to make the audience uncomfortable, including people who were past victims of sexual assault or personally know someone who was. If Covid was particularly traumatizing in your personal life, you’re probably going to want to avoid this film entirely.

On the other hand I did get to see Eddington for virtually free, since A24 drops tickets for their films on subscribers.

Rating: B-