On the basis of his films Hereditary and Midsommer, it would be tempting to pigeonhole Ari Aster as a director of horror films. However, his third movie, Beau is Afraid, was an indication that his primary focus is human behavior, which is at times more inexplicable and terrifying than anything that might go bump in the night.
His latest movie, Eddington, is an examination of our nations’ reactions to the Covid-19 crisis, reflected in the citizens of the titular southwestern town. The first filmmaker to tackle this potentially volatile subject matter, the director managed to accomplish one of his goals by dipping his toe into one of our most cherished genres.
“I’ve always wanted to make a western,” he said during a recent conversation in Chicago. “I’ve always been fascinated by the genre. I grew up in New Mexico, so the landscape you might see in those films was my environment. I was living in New Mexico for about three months during the Covid lockdown. At the end of May 2020, I was feeling what was in the air and I thought, ‘I have to get this down on paper.’ I wasn’t sure where we were headed but I knew I had to get what was happening and how I was feeling down on paper.”
One of the themes that emerged as Aster worked on the script was how the concept of
community has changed.
“Though I intended for it to be a modern western, another way of saying it would be it’s a movie about a community, but they’re all separate,” he said. “They are all living
on the internet; they’re all living in different realities in different corners of the internet. And I was feeling the effects of those bubbles of certainty starting to collide.”
Well aware he was dealing with a polemic issue, Aster was fully conscious that his own perspective couldn’t be allowed to push the film in a particular direction.
“The film is about polarization,” he continued, “and the response has been predictably polarized. I’ve noticed the people who have the biggest problem with the film are the ones who want me to take a stronger stance. But for me to make a partisan film, I think it would have only reached the choir it was preaching to.”
And while the issues facing our country are complex, the director thinks the first step to reconciliation is through open, honest dialogue. However, he has doubts that will ever occur.
“I can’t even see a scenario where that happens, when people sit down and talk,” he laments. “But I do feel it is the only possible way off this path. A question that persists to me is what does an olive branch look like in this environment? I wanted the film to be empathetic in multiple directions. The film is a satire, which is a dangerous word to use, because it means something different to everybody. What the film is most critical of is the environment. To point to just one faction of people and to point to the hypocrisy that exists in that little corner would not be too interesting, but too obvious.”
The filmmaker knows Eddington has a rough road towards reaching all factions of the audience.
“I don’t mean to make the film sound preachy,” he says of his approach. “It’s a western, it’s a genre film. Really, when it comes down to it, I wanted to make a genre film that was inflected by modern realism. In the end, it’s a movie about people who live in the internet, and the isolation that comes from that is what’s led us to this point.”
This article appears in Jul 10-16, 2025.
