Eddington, writer-director Ari Aster’s polarizing new black dramedy, opens with a troubling sight: an unhoused and clearly distressed man walking through the New Mexico desert, bleating an incoherent ramble of modern buzzwords.
Troubling not for the man, but for the content of his ramble and the time: late May, 2020. TikTok. My immediate reaction was a derogatory “oh no”. Aster has specialized in gut-twisting, unworldly horror, the kind of brain-searing, highly symbolic shocks that linger for weeks; I watched large stretches of his first two features, the demonic family parable Hereditary and Swedish solstice nightmare Midsommar – through my fingers. But in Eddington, he took on not one but two insidious bogeymen haunting our psyches: phones in movies and Covid.
