A satire about our broken brains that might re-break your brain

Joaquin Phoenix (left) and Pedro Pascal in a scene from “Eddington” (A24)

You might need to lie down for a bit after “Eddington.” Preferably in a dark room with no screens and no talking. “Eddington,” Ari Aster’s latest nightmare vision, is sure to divide (along which lines, I can’t fathom) but there is one thing I think everyone will be able to agree on: It is an experience that will leave you asking “WHAT?” The movie opens on the aggravated ramblings of an unhoused man and doesn’t get much more coherent from there. Approach with caution.

We talk a lot about movies as an escape from the stresses of the world. “Eddington,” in which a small, fictional town in New Mexico becomes a microcosm of life in the misinformation age, and more specifically during the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, is very much the opposite of that. It is an anti-escapist symphony of masking debates, conspiracy theories, YouTube prophets, TikTok trends and third-rail topics in which no side is spared. Most everyone looks insane and ridiculous by the end, from the white teenage girl (Amélie Hoeferle) telling a Black cop (Michael Ward) to join the movement, to the grammatical errors of the truthers, as the town spirals into chaos and gruesome violence.

Joaquin Phoenix plays the town sheriff, a soft-spoken wife guy named Joe Cross, who we meet out in the desert one night watching YouTube videos about how to convince your wife to have a baby. He’s interrupted by cops from the neighboring town, who demand he put on a mask since he’s technically crossed the border.

It is May 2020, and everyone is a little on edge. Joe, frustrated by the hysterical commitment to mandates from nowhere, finds himself the unofficial spokesperson for the right to go unmasked. He pits himself against the slick local mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is up for reelection, in the pocket of big tech and ready to exploit his single fatherhood for political gain. At home, Joe’s mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) spends all day consuming internet conspiracy theories, while his wife Louise (a criminally underused Emma Stone) works on crafts and nurses unspoken traumas.

The problem with an anarchic satire like “Eddington,” in theaters Friday, is that any criticism could easily be dismissed with a “that’s the point” counterargument. “Eddington” is not incompetently done or unwatchable (the cast and the director kind of guarantee that); it just doesn’t feel a whole of anything other than a cinematic expression of broken brains.

It’s possible “Eddington” will age well. Perhaps it’s the kind of movie that future Gen Alpha cinephiles will point to as being ahead of its time, a work that was woefully misunderstood by head-in-the-sand critics who didn’t see that it was 2025’s answer to the prescient paranoia cinema of the 1970s.

Not to sound like the studio boss in “Sullivan’s Travels,” trying to get the filmmaker with big issues on the mind to make a dumb comedy, but right now, “Eddington” feels like the last thing any of us need. LINDSEY BAHR, MDT/AP Film Writer

“Eddington,” an A24 release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “or strong violence, some grisly images, language and graphic nudity.”Running time: 148 minutes.★★★★