Eddington on Canal Plus: Joaquin Phoenix in an angry portrait of contemporary America
With his first film in competition at Cannes 2025, virtuoso, grueling and exciting, Ari Aster confirms his unique place in American cinema today.
A year after its cinema release, Eddington is broadcast for the first time this Tuesday evening on Canal Plus and visible in streaming on MyCanal. The latest film by Ari Aster (who is currently preparing Scapegoat with Scarlett Johansson) had attracted only 200,000 curious people to French cinemas, and First highly recommend you catch up on this nightmarish trip starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone and Austin Butler. Our review:
After the triumphs ofHeredity and of MidsommarAri Aster began to distance himself from the horror genre, perhaps out of fear of being put into a box or encumbered by labels – mainly the dreaded label ““elevated horror”. Beau is afraidhis third feature, a three-hour psychoanalytic odyssey, seriously blurred the lines between black comedy, trip film and psyche cartoon. “But who is Ari Aster really?” was one of the hundreds of questions we asked ourselves as we left the room.
Eddington confirms in any case that with him, horror is never far away – if by horror we mean nightmare visions, gut-wrenching violence, cold sweats, a feeling of haunting and astonishment, and the impression of sinking into a bad trip stickier with every step. The nightmare here is that of the failing America of the 2020s – of May 2020, very precisely, in the heart of the Covid pandemic and at the time of a new outbreak of the Black Lives Matter movement, in reaction to the murder of George Floyd. The film takes place in a town in New Mexico, which serves as a microscopic (ridiculously microscopic) metonymy for all of America. And the idea is to immerse us in an explosive shaker condensing all the evils, faults and crazy obsessions of the time, in case our daily dose of continuous news and doomscrolling is not enough.
The entire US population, the most hysterical, politically angry, or just totally lost, is therefore there: conspiracy theorists, antifa activists, enlightened gurus, victims of sexual violence, influencers, revolted woke youth, communities white-hot by systemic racism, citizens who no longer “contract”, delusional bums, against a backdrop of mentions of Doctor Fauci and MAGA columnist Tucker Carlson. A monstrous parade summoned via a myriad of computer screens and smartphones, frames within the frame which gives Eddington his aggressive and woozy appearance. A common misconception says that it would not be interesting to film people with their noses in their phones (which is why three quarters of US films take place in the 20th century). Not interesting? When Ari Aster and cinematographer Darius Khondji get involved, it becomes one.
The film focuses on the journey of a sheriff at the end of his rope, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix, always very good in front of Aster’s camera) on the verge of going into political-psychotic spins. Because he refuses to wear a mask because of his asthma, and because he has become a micro-network star after helping another citizen without a mask to do his shopping at the local convenience store, Joe decides to run for mayor against the current city councilor (Pedro Pascal), who supports big government business. Between them, there is Cross’s wife, Louise (Emma Stone, always up for a crazy experience), an unhappy artist suffering from an unspeakable illness.
This is the starting point, which only gives a very vague idea of the hallucinatory dimension that the affair will soon take on. Quite tortuous and elusive in its implementation, very grating in its black humor which seems to bring back to back all the parts of fractured America, Eddington will begin to demonstrate a staggering formal mastery in its third act, when it plunges for good into the dark night and sets out to make people feel concretely, physically, what disorientation is (political, moral, existential), the blurring of landmarks and perception, the feeling of disintegration of reality, and the ground of cows which suddenly disappears beneath our feet.
We talk about cows because the setting is that of the ancestral western, of an immemorial America and the protagonist looks like a cowboy. But we are well in the world after No Country For Old Mena step further than the Coens in darkness and panic. A mention of John Ford at the end of the film, and before that the express and devastating visit to a museum dedicated to the history of the West, confirms Aster’s ambition to fit within the framework of the “great American novel” – a genre (of cinema) in itself. His novel, nourished by postmodernism, is crossed out, abrasive, exhausting, clearly not made to please everyone, but absolutely unique in its kind. Who the hell is Ari Aster? Great American filmmaker, well, this is a role that suits him well.
Eddingtonby Ari Aster, with Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone… Duration 2h25.
