Ari Aster had a little deceived. Just a little. Hollywood’s new “King of Terror”, as he was baptized (precipitously) after the impact of ‘Hereditary’ (2018) and ‘Midsommar’ (2019), had a past that betrayed him. His prolific trajectory as the author of Short Films – this titles since 2008 – announced a filmmaker much more inclined towards black comedy, grotesque satire or the psychological drama than towards pure and hard terror. Closest to Lanthimos or Charlie Kaufman Yorgos, to understand us, that Jordan Peele or Robert Eggers, the other two banners of what was called “high terror.”
In fact, both his third work, ‘Beau is afraid’ (based on his own short ‘Beau’), as this ‘Eddington’, whose script wrote ten years ago, were going to be his first long -term projects. It is as if, thanks to the success within the genre of horror, Aster was now filming what really interests him. Even in his facet as a producer, the same thematic and stylistic derivation can be seen: ‘Dream Scenario’ (2023), ‘Sasquatch Sunset’ (2024), ‘Bad languages’ (2024) or ‘Bugonia’, La Nueva de Lanthimos.
‘Eddington’ is born from two autobiographical experiences. On the one hand, the director’s adolescence. Aster was born in New York, but grew in New Mexico, where the action takes place, in a small town that functions as microcosm of the present. On the other, the Covid pandemic. Aster, which has been defined as neurotic and hypochondriac, confessed in Cannes – where he first competed for the golden palm – that he lived that period with enormous anguish.
All that anxiety, bewilderment, paranoia and fear generated by the pandemic in the United States, aggravated by the murder of George Floyd and the protests of the Black Lives Matter movement, impregnate ‘Eddington’ as an ultrapesimist reminder of the current world of post -truth, democratic crisis and ideological trenches in which we live immersed.
Aster has built a made of the western made of the key. The Wild West as a metaphor of the end of the democratic dialogue, as a symbolic scenario where to express physically, through weapons (the pandemic triggered its sale, reaching the current average of 120 per 100 people), the verbal confrontation that is lived on mobile phones. In fact, the recent murder of Trumpist politician Charlie Kirk (and those who will probably follow him) can end up making ‘Eddington’ an almost involuntarily hyperrealistic documentary.
The narrative, tone and staging of ‘Eddington’ seem to follow the logic of their characters (played by a luxury cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone and Austin Butler) and of the American political and social situation itself: it is excessive, grandiloquent, unbalanced, erratic. A hyperbolic mixture of contemporary Western, Black Comedy and Conspiranoic Thriller that evokes the violent satires of the Coen brothers or a deranged version of ‘Only to danger’ (1952). It does not work at all as comedy or as a criminal intrigue, but as corrosive political satire and projection of its author’s fears. “No,” Aster seems to say: “After the Covid we don’t go better.”
