Ari Aster is a master of unsettling cinema. While he already captured anxiety in Beau is Afraid, he harkens back to the good ol’ days of the COVID-19 pandemic (when reality seemed to be spiraling) in his new film Eddington. Aster pits Joaquin Phoenix against Pedro Pascal in what’s being called “The first truly modern western.” A24 has released a final trailer just before its release on July 18, and the tension is boiling up!
Here is the official plot of Eddington: “In May of 2020, a standoff between a small-town sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and mayor (Pedro Pascal) sparks a powder keg as neighbor is pitted against neighbor in Eddington, New Mexico.” In addition to Phoenix, who previously teamed with Aster for 2023’s Beau is Afraid, and Pascal, the cast also features Emma Stone, Austin Butler, Clifton Collins Jr., Luke Grimes, Deirdre O’Connell, and Michael Ward.
Eddington premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, competing for the Palme d’Or and making it the first of Aster’s films to do so. Unfortunately, the film received mixed reviews in France, causing some to wonder if he was a flash in the pan and wouldn’t be able to top Hereditary and Midsommar. But Aster purposely avoided them (at least at the time), telling The New York Times, “I have not been reading reviews while I’m doing press here, just because I know myself and it’s like quicksand. So I’ve been staying away from whatever people are saying until I leave. I knew what I was making, and we figured it would be divisive. I don’t even know if that’s the case, but I’ve heard something like that.”
Aster had actually spoken about this project years ago, when the director participated in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on Reddit. He explained, “There was a period of time when I thought Midsommar would be the debut feature, and there was a period when I thought another script called Eddington might be the first movie. For like five years, I was trying to get that Western-noir dark ensemble comedy going. That won’t be the next one, by the way, though I do still want to make it very badly. I made Hereditary first, but I always had Midsommar in my back pocket, like it was right there in me.” He told the Italian publication La Reppublica that Eddington is “sort of a – I don’t know if you’d call it a revisionist western. It’s contemporary; one foot is in the western and one foot is even more heavily in the noir genre. So it’s like a film noir ensemble western dark comedy.“
