Weekend Read: Eddington is a Modern Classic 🤠

Screens everywhere, heroes nowhere, and a country way past saving

Eddington was one of my favorite films at Cannes—and having now seen it twice, I feel even more certain: this is a major work. Funny, incredibly well made, with great performances and a rich, layered story that grabs the third rail and doesn’t let go. I’m flummoxed by the outright hate it’s getting, but also devilishly thrilled by the critical divide. If people are this BIG MAD, it’s because the film hits a nerve—hard.

What Ari Aster has done here feels dangerous in the best way. Eddington is hysterical and bleak, smart and silly, a film that pokes at the most uncomfortable fault lines of American life circa 2020. It’s set in the heat of COVID, in a small New Mexico town haunted by the pandemic, police violence, and algorithmic brain rot, resulting in the collapse of shared reality.

The ghostly tech center rising on the outskirts of town is the perfect metaphor—no one knows what it does, who it’s for, or why it’s there, but it radiates quiet, ambient menace. The town was already frayed, and this glowing, humming monument to the tech gods feels like the final spectral push over the edge.

Ari Aster and Pedro Pascal

Want to know what I really think of Emma Stone and Austin Butler here? Which other provocateurs Ari Aster is in conversation with? The final grade?

You know what to do—upgrade your Schmear Hunter subscription.