Ari Aster’s Eddington doesn’t just open, it startles. The first (and maybe only) true jump scare arrives before we’ve even had time to settle in. A barefoot old man shuffles down the center of an empty Western town’s main road, muttering to himself as he climbs a jagged hill under a twilight sky. He turns to stare, or glare, back at the silence below.

Then, in big stark letters: LATE MAY, 2020.

Suddenly, the empty streets make sense. The man’s ramblings? Maybe pandemic paranoia. Maybe actual madness. Or maybe, and this is the unnerving part, he’s the only sane person left. By that point in real life, most of us felt a little “one raisin short of a fruitcake,” stuck in a world where sirens wailed nonstop, death counts scrolled endlessly, and the news fed us a relentless diet of facts, half-facts, and pure nonsense.

That strange blend

of unreality and hyper-reality is exactly what Aster bottles here. Known for Hereditary and Midsommar, and the deeply personal Beau Is Afraid, Aster’s films have always been more about lingering unease than easy scares. With Eddington, he takes a left turn into western territory but it is still very much his brand of feel-bad catharsis.

The story centers on Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix )the asthmatic sheriff of Eddington, New Mexico. He’s stuck in a house with his depressed wife Louise (Emma Stone), who spends her days making strange dolls to sell online, and her conspiracy-obsessed mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), who’s convinced the pandemic is part of some elaborate plot. Joe’s patience is fraying with Dawn, with the town’s mask mandate, and especially with Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), Louise’s tall, charming, well-off ex-boyfriend from decades past.

Aster’s version of a western is dusty and slow-burning, but also oddly funny in its awkwardness. The tension doesn’t come from shootouts, but from the small-town claustrophobia of a pandemic, the petty politics of local government, and the sharp little resentments that only thrive when you’ve been stuck indoors too long.

Eddington

is less about the plot than the mood, a strange, off-kilter snapshot of a moment when the world felt unreal and every interaction carried a quiet, invisible threat. It’s uncomfortable, a little absurd, and at times uncomfortably close to home.