by Staci Layne Wilson
There are some films you want to see, and some films you feel you should see. Then there’s Eddington. It was a cinematic root canal I was dreading, but couldn’t stop watching once it started drilling. Writer-director Ari Aster did it again: he turned modern American despair into a work of art so queasy, compelling, and darkly funny that you can’t look away, even as your sanity starts to unravel like a loose sweater thread.
I’ve been thinking about Eddington since I saw it last November. Not occasionally, in the passive background-hum way you think about a film you enjoyed—I mean thinking about it. It colonized a corner of my brain and set up camp there. So when the 98th Academy Award nominations dropped earlier this year and Eddington wasn’t on the list anywhere (not a single category, not even a crumb thrown in the direction of Joaquin Phoenix’s genuinely unnerving performance), I made a sound I typically reserve for stepping on a Lego barefoot in the dark.
