Eddington’s Ari Aster captures all our fears and anxieties

What’s your impression of the singular mind behind some of the most frightening films of the past decade?

Ari Aster is the man who imagined and executed the image of Toni Collette decapitating herself while floating near the ceiling in Hereditary. He was also behind emotionally torturing Florence Pugh’s character in Midsommar.

His films, which also includes the three-hour anxiety attack that is Beau is Afraid, and now the political drama-comedy Eddington, hints at a filmmaker who must surely be all neuroses, sombreness and mummy issues.

“I guess I make all those spooky scaries, people are expecting me to be a weird dude,” Aster told The Nightly.

That’s what actor Luke Grimes thought he might be getting when he signed up for a role in Eddington, that Aster would be a brooding guy who just hung out in a tent, away from everyone else. But that’s not what Grimes found.

“The one surprising thing about Ari is that whatever darkness there is in his work, he doesn’t wear that as a person,” he said.

“He’s such a sweetheart, and so nice and kind and very thoughtful, and he’s a hugger, believe it or not. There’s no part of the darkness of his scripts or his films that exist in him as a person.”

A hugger. Ari Aster. The man who subjected a character to a blood eagle, his still-breathing lungs splayed on the outside of his body.

The horrors in Eddington are less gory, but they are just as punchy. But rather than devil worshippers or pagan cultists, the dread and fear in Eddington is something much closer to home.

Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Austin Butler and Grimes, Eddington is set in May 2020, in a small town in the American state of New Mexico. The local sheriff, Joe Cross (Phoenix), is in a feud with the mayor (Pascal) over mask mandates but there’s also a personal history there.

Joe decides to challenge him in the upcoming election, on a platform of individual freedoms, while boiling over in the background are conspiracy theories, the Black Lives Matter movement and growing disinformation.

It may be a period in history many of us would rather forget – there have been relatively few dramatisations of covid lockdowns beyond the initial batch while the world was still living through it – but Aster is not one of them.

“Personally, I am hungry for movies, books and arty that reflects the moment, and that is about the moment,” he said. “Arguably, it’s the role of the artist to reflect his own time or their own time.”

It’s been five years since the era in Eddington but the fallout from that time can be seen in every news headline today. Aster’s film touches on all the points in which people stopped listening to each other, siloed in their own “truths”, and that’s something we’re all still contending with.

“I wanted to make a film about how so many of us have lost the dimensions of the bigger world outside of us, and we only really know the dimensions of the smaller world that we believe in, and anything that contradicts that, we distrust,” he explained.

“It’s something I was felling, and I was kind of living on Twitter at the time, and it’s sort of the movie that Twitter wrote.”

Aster said he had a lot of people in his life that were living in completely different realities who insisted everything was catastrophic and urgent, but that wasn’t his experience.

“I found that we were unreachable to each other,” he added.

Eddington, while a different genre to his first two films, Hereditary and Midsommar, still came from a place of his personal fear and anxiety. The film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May and from the moment of its premiere, the reception of it has been almost as divisive as the time it had portrayed.

Grimes said, “Anytime you do a movie that is political satire, it’s going to make people kind of upset, and be divisive. I think we all knew that going in.”

Key to the consternation over Eddington is a final act which ramps up into an all-out action movie with a hectic set-piece involving masked figures and a rapid-fire gunfight.

Even Grimes didn’t see it coming. “By the last act, I was like, ‘What is going on? This is not at all what I thought where this movie was going’. At the same time, it’s really funny, and really heartbreaking, and really terrifying.”

The division over the film reflects how tricky it is to be in direct conversation with themes such as collective trauma, fractured communities, disinformation and mistrust, when there hasn’t been anything close to a resolution.

If anything, we may be even further adrift than in 2020. The reaction to Eddington reflects back the movie itself.

“There are days where the movie takes on, suddenly, a lot of baggage, especially lately,” Aster said. “The film changes for me as I watch it, so I know it’s going to be impacted by the world as others watch it, and by their baggage.

“I hope it’s an empathetic film, it’s just empathetic in many directions and some of those directions are oppositional, and there are characters that will appeal to some more than others.

“The film might function as something of a Rorschach test for a lot of people.”

Aster might be a hugger but his movies – his challenging, provocative and anxiety-inducing movies - still trigger one question that surely everyone can agree on, “Is Ari Aster OK?”.

He responded, with an easy laugh, “Yeah, I’m OK. I’ve got this outlet. I get to make movies.”

Eddington is in cinemas on August 21