The landscape remembers. And in the parched, sun-baked sprawl of Central Texas, as in the New Mexico that birthed Ari Aster, there’s a particular kind of forgetting that takes root, an amnesia born of heat and dust and the hum of progress.
Ari Aster, a filmmaker whose oeuvre tends to dismember the comfortable illusion of reality, has once again presented us with a mirror, albeit a darkly fractured one, in his latest offering, “Eddington.” It’s a film that, like a mirage on a summer highway, flickers with familiar anxieties, making it a disquieting conversation for anyone who calls the American Southwest home.
Aster has traded the pagan rituals of “Midsommar” and the Freudian nightmares of “Hereditary” for a more insidious horror in “Eddington” — the American fracture of 2020. The setting is a fictional New Mexico town, but the tremors it depicts are, unsettlingly, our own. It’s a modern Western and a paranoid thriller, a story of a nation under pressure, sifting reality through the haze of social media, and ultimately, losing its collective mind…