Insofar as a poster for a film can wield the same power as a title for an art installation, the inception and key to Eddington’s kaleidoscope may well lie in the enigmatic affiche unveiled at Cannes earlier this year. Depicting an arresting freeze-frame of three American bison plunging into the void from a cliff—an image with no obvious connection to the story itself—it instantly tuned the audience’s expectations to the right frequency and at the same time hinted at the film’s intellectual ambitions.
A serendipitous surprise for an Ari Aster novice like me, Eddington turns out to be a social satire which, beneath sparse and relatively tolerable genre clichés, unfolds as an intelligent reflection on the paranoid itches of our modern times, even bearing traits of fine literary maximalism.
Some sort of bento box in which Aster has laid out Covid, AI, and Black Lives Matter alongside other sensitive prompts, the film seems to essay upon our deepest human ineptitude and ultimate inability to communicate, exacerbated by the inadequacy of the very devices we have concocted to cope with recent critical circumstances. The fate awaiting sheriff Cross—his body deformed by that very aberration and his social faculties irreversibly dependent on technology—feels like a bleak joke, the atrocious irony designed to keep the debate alive once the end credits have sent us back into our own, non-dissimilar world.
Largely dismissed as self-indulgent on the Croisstte the year where a real palm fell revealing rotten roots to some preposterous metaphorical concurrence as self-indulgent and short-lived in British cinemas, Eddington is not the kind of film you can watch once and swipe up. Rather, its cinematic treatment of themes still scarcely reckoned with by our society—and art—renders one of the most genuinely original works I have encountered to date on the subject. The subtle threat Arister insinuates is hardly ever on screen, yet a strangely familiar—if cinematically unconventional—sense of horror is nonetheless palpable. Echoing Michelle Goldberg in her review for The New York Times¹, the main villain remains an artificial-intelligence data centre, emerging ‘after a lot of blood and death, as a singular beneficiary of the town’s derangement, and a reminder our informational pandemic is just getting started.’

1. A Movie About the Year America Went Fully Berserk, Michelle Goldberg (The New York Times, 18 July 2025).