Despite a small body of work, American director Ari Aster has established a genre of his own. His debut Hereditary (2018) helped launch the term “elevated horror”, as a domestic tale of family grief segued into an unhinged supernatural horror. Midsommar (2019) fuelled Florence Pugh’s ascent to stardom and made us all very worried about attending Swedish folk festivals. If Beau Is Afraid (2023), an unwieldy update on The Odyssey, proved more difficult for audiences to parse, fear not – armed with the same star in Joaquin Phoenix, Aster has now upped the ante even further.
Each of the above three films followed emotionally beleaguered heroes subjected to absurd trials amidst lashings of shocking violence. A contemporary western, Eddington turns Aster’s usual preoccupations inside out, so that instead of focusing on the psychological travails of a single unravelling protagonist, the scope is widened to a cross-section of racially diverse inhabitants in a fictional small town (subbed in by New Mexico). By the end of a blood-soaked third act, it’s clear that Eddington is a microcosm of the state of America.
