Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal drag us back to 2020 in new Eddington trailer

Ari Aster's latest film left Cannes audiences divided.

By Emma Keates  |  June 10, 2025 | 10:49am
Photo: A24
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Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal drag us back to 2020 in new Eddington trailer
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Forgot the taste of dalgona coffee, big lasagna, and stress-infused banana bread? The new Eddington trailer will bring it right back. It may also remind you of some of the less savory parts of that weird, weird year, like hours-long COVID testing lines, viral child trafficking conspiracies, fights over mask mandates, and most notably, the collective feeling that nothing was quite real anymore, and nothing would ever be the same. 

This isn’t just a redux of Charlie Booker’s Death To 2020; there’s an actual story brewing underneath that sheen of “remember this?” The new Ari Aster film follows an anti-mask sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) as he takes on the COVID-conscious mayor (Pedro Pascal) of Eddington, a small, fictional town in New Mexico. Their conflict, which begins as a classic, Western-style standoff, eventually “sparks a powder keg as neighbor is pitted against neighbor,” per the film’s logline. 

You can probably imagine some of the battle lines along which those face-offs are drawn. The trailer gestures towards political division, the Black Lives Matter movement, and viral internet conspiracies via characters played by Emma Stone, Austin Butler, and Deirdre O’Connell. 

As you also may have guessed, the film split critics and audiences right down the middle when it premiered last month at Cannes. “It’s very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this,” Pascal reflected at a festival press conference, per IndieWire. “I felt like [Aster] wrote something that was all our worst fears as that lockdown experience was already a fracturing society. This was building toward an untethered sense of reality. There is a point of not going back.” 

You can decide where you stand on the whole concept when Eddington hits theaters July 18.

 
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