Eddington: a 'deranged' yet 'insightful' pandemic satire starring Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal

May 2020 was nobody's idea of a good time, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times.

We were living with an invisible and potentially fatal threat, and "surrounded by screens from which blared real facts, half-facts, fact-shaped nonsense and full-on gobbledygook".

This new film from director Ari Aster takes us back to that era through the microcosm of a fictional New Mexican town called Eddington, where sheriff Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) lives with his depressed wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her conspiracy theorist mother (Deirdre O'Connell). Against a backdrop of Covid and BLM protests, "everything is getting under Joe's skin": he's annoyed by pandemic restrictions and intensely resents the town's "performatively liberal" mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). His rage builds until one day, he "cracks", announcing that he plans to run for mayor on an anti-lockdown platform.

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"Eddington" is certainly ambitious, said Justin Chang in The New Yorker. It "has the dust of a western, the snark of a satire, the violence of a thriller, the nihilism of a noir, and the bloat of an epic". Its subjects are "the morass of misinformation and irreconcilable political rancour" that has taken hold since the pandemic. Unfortunately, it's also a "slog", and the laughs are largely "reactionary" – at the expense of "the young and woke".

Well, it seemed fairly even-handed to me, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times: right-wingers and QAnon fruitcakes get it in the neck too. This is a "feelbad" movie, but it's an "insightful" one. "Things get pointedly deranged", as "the personal and political are yoked together in a spiralling final act, frantic and elaborate".