Ari Aster’s Eddington (2025) follows a violent conflict in a small American town, but doesn’t track it like the conventional Westerns, where you’re told whom to root for. The film depicts the hot-button topics from the COVID-19 pandemic era that were either impossible to ignore or notice. Aster’s script doesn’t give us a single hero to side with, nor does it offer a single villain to despise. Instead, it attempts to portray the political turmoil on US soil as faithfully as possible. Its satire is meant to disturb and enrage you as things go out of control, seemingly with no end in sight. Even the film’s bleak, cynical ending doesn’t choose any side in the country’s corporate-funded bipartisan politics. Instead, it fills you with dread as it offers a rather bleak mirror to the present-day world, where people are either ignoring the elephant in the room or being blissfully unaware of it. Here’s my interpretation of it all.
Spoilers Ahead
Eddington (2025) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
‘Eddington,’ written and directed by Ari Aster, is a satirical neo-Western that centers around a mayoral election in a New Mexico town, which quickly snowballs into a tragedy impossible to ignore or run away from.
What happens in Eddington?
The film takes place in May 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic had just started affecting people across the globe. It all led to a call for nationwide lockdowns among other mandates, which also affected Eddington, a small town in New Mexico. That’s where Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) serves as the mayor, while Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) serves as the sheriff. They don’t see eye to eye on many things, and the mandates happen to be one of them. Ted imposes them as per the Governor’s orders, but Joe opposes them, claiming they’re against people’s freedom of choice.
Joe makes a case for not wearing masks by entering a convenience store, unmasked. He positions himself as the voice of the helpless by assisting a man to enter that store or a vagrant to enter a bar, unmasked. Ted warns him against it, which Joe considers a personal insult. So, he impulsively decides to run for the Mayoral position. Soon, Ted tries to talk him out of it by pointing out his past favors to keep his boat afloat as the Sheriff. Joe smells Ted’s desperation, which is why he doubles down on his plans to run against him in the next elections. Alas, that doesn’t go down well with his wife, Louise (Emma Stone).
What happens between Joe and Louise?
Joe lives with Louise and her mother, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), somewhere on the outskirts. Louise is emotionally distant, while her mother is eternally online. The internet feeds on Dawn’s sense of emptiness by leading her to conspiracy theories. It also introduces Louise to Vernon (Austin Butler), a charismatic and influential celebrity who shares his radically problematic views with anyone vulnerable enough to consider them as factual truths. Louise finds his presence liberating as opposed to Joe’s. Joe secretly supports her small business, but that doesn’t help him to truly connect with her.
It gets worse as he decides to run in the Mayoral race without consulting Louise. She fears the spotlight it will bring to her and her past with Ted. The film hints that Ted dated her a while ago, but has since been distant. Instead of supporting her, Joe uses her as a tool for his campaign, claiming Ted sexually abused her. She debunks that claim through an online video and flees town with Vernon. Before that, Vernon stops by their house, where he speaks about the survivors of abuse. Joe notices that Louise feels connected with Vernon, as she doesn’t with him. During that conversation, Louise hints at abuse from her father. After she flees with Vernon, Dawn tries to absolve herself from the resulting guilt or embarrassment, but cannot convince her to return home.
What happens between Sarah, Eric, and Brian?
Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle) is a teenager, driven by a pursuit of social justice. Brian (Cameron Mann) is secretly interested in her, while Ted’s son, Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), ridicules her for preaching her views through TikToks (online videos) about having read books like James Baldwin’s ‘Giovanni’s Room.’ One night, Brian tries to break the ice by talking aboutAngela Davis’s ‘Women, Race, and Class’, the book he sees her holding at the time. She sees through him and doesn’t pay him any heed. Unlike him, Eric charms her in no time. She clicks a selfie with him and posts it online.
Her friend claims that she is doing that to make her boyfriend jealous. The boyfriend happens to be Officer Michael (Micheal Ward), working under Joe. Regardless, she starts hanging out with Eric, who joins a Black Lives Matter protest in the town. Initially, Joe ignores the protest, thinking it would stop by itself. However, it turns into a cultural moment in no time, causing ripple effects across the country, including Eddington, where it turns into a riot. Joe tries to calm down the protestors, but to no avail. Instead, he gets triggered as Eric speaks about his father’s relationship with Louise. In the heat of the moment, Joe tries to snatch someone’s phone, but people record his outburst and post it online.
Earlier, Eric recorded Joe in a scuffle with a vagrant. Someone posts it online, besides his recent outburst at the protest, which leads people to start losing their trust in him. Meanwhile, Ted keeps getting more and more support from his campaign voters, which gets on Joe’s nerves. To make matters worse, Ted slaps Joe when he shows up to turn down the music at his campaign event. It gives a major blow to his ego, which compels him to make another impulsive decision. As it happens, Brian keeps supporting Sarah’s views of social justice, hoping that it will bring them closer. However, that doesn’t help, which leads him to resort to doing something diametrically opposite.
All 4 Ari Aster Movies (Including Eddington), Ranked
Eddington (2025) Movie Ending Explained:
Why does Joe implicate Michael for Eric and Ted’s murders?
After getting slapped by Ted, Joe fumes in anger. It leads him to kill a vagrant and drop his body in a nearby river. The same night, he shoots Ted to death with a sniper rifle, and also kills Eric. Soon, he enters Ted’s house and spray-paints a message on his wall, implicating radical activists for the crime. The next morning, Brian shows up at the station to inform them about Sarah and Michael. He reveals that he sent a picture of Sarah and Eric’s kiss to Michael, knowing that Michael was probably interested in her. Joe connects the dots to implicate Michael for Eric’s death and puts him behind bars.
All Joe does is build a narrative based on circumstantial evidence to protect himself. He portrays ‘hidden extremists’ as the threat so that he can avoid any accountability for his actions. Yet, he hits a roadblock when Officer Jiminez Butterfly (William Belleau) starts looking into facts based on the DNA and handwriting evidence. Butterfly arrives at the crime scene for investigation, since the shots were fired from the land that belongs to his Pueblo tribe. Joe outright ridicules him so that his non-existent intellect or blatant disregard for standard procedures isn’t brought into question. Joe twists and turns the narrative to serve his motives.
Yet, Butterfly notices Joe’s car and his handwriting at the station to figure out that Joe’s behind it all. He rushes to Joe’s house, and Joe follows him. Soon, Officer Guy (Luke Grimes) calls Joe to reveal that some extremists have broken into the station to take Michael with them. Joe and Guy follow some signs across the town to locate Michael. Michael warns them not to come closer to him, but Guy doesn’t listen, which costs him his life. Joe and Guy get heavily injured as a fire lights up on this piece of land in a pattern, which reads ‘No Peace,’ while a drone hovers over them.
What happens to Joe Cross in the end?
Toward the end, Joe can’t catch a breath as people start shooting him from every possible direction. He walks back home and confuses Dawn with Louise. Joe assumes Vernon is behind it all as the shots keep getting fired toward him. He runs back into the town, breaks into a gun store, and walks out with a machine gun. Then, he starts firing aimlessly around him and accidentally shoots Officer Butterfly, who soon gets killed in the crossfire. Then, a masked assailant approaches Joe and stabs him in the head. Brian, who sees it from a distance, takes out his phone to record the incident as he shoots down the assailant.
In the end, Brian turns into a conservative icon for saving a white cop from an extremist. Joe becomes the mayor, but suffers from paralysis. Dawn starts speaking on his behalf as they unveil the data centre — the same one that Joe once opposed, but Ted used for his campaign. Joe can’t even make a case for himself anymore and is bedridden. Meanwhile, the data centre adds a mural to commemorate Officer Butterfly’s legacy, but it seems like just a performative gesture, as futile as a pizza slice from those corporate appreciation parties.
It all becomes a way for everyone to mask the fact that the facility will keep depleting resources from their already impoverished town, leaving them with no water to drink, air to breathe, among other things. Eventually, in the film’s final moments, Michael, who becomes the new undersheriff, is seen practicing target shooting somewhere in an open space. It almost feels like he is preparing for a future where he will be racially prejudiced despite his position, and even by people (like Brian) who claimed to support the cause against racial inequalities. The moment echoes a sentiment of hopelessness that drives almost every single character to similarly extreme steps.
Eddington (2025) Movie Themes Analyzed:
Misinformation, Institutional Corrosion, and Opportunism
Ari Aster packs up plenty of thematic subtext in ‘Eddington’ that is interconnected in one way or another. The common thread through it all is technology and how it’s often being used to spread misinformation, creating rifts between people while latching onto their insecurities to gain more followers. It leads to the growth of cult-like leaders like Vernon or Brian. It also forces people to see their lifelong friends as threats or enemies. Otherwise, technology comes in the form of the deep learning / AI data centre, which someone as supposedly noble as Ted was advocating for. He called it a way to provide more opportunities, but it was largely being built to satisfy his self-serving notions.
Ted doesn’t even listen to Paula, who points out the data centre’s disastrous effects on his community, since that corporate funding enables him to continue being the mayor. However, Joe, who’s opposing it, is also doing it out of his self-serving notions. They are opportunists, much like Brian, who uses his apparent social consciousness mostly to be with Sarah. The moment this ideology doesn’t serve him to get what he wants, he immediately turns into a conservative influencer, preaching the opposite of his earlier beliefs. It’s the ‘whatever sails the boat’ system in this world that the film aims to capture by tracing the commonalities in everyone’s motives.
Through these portraits, the film also highlights the overall lack of trust in the institutions that people believed would always be there to protect them. All the anger, frustration, or violence we see in the movie is a result of institutional corrosion, at least partially fuelled by social media, but also by an inability to look beyond their own needs in a system that is designed to make them feel utterly helpless. Then, there are also those systems designed to capitalize on their loss of hope and disillusionment. So, the film essentially feels like a cynical look into this endlessly exploitative cycle.
