It feels strange that we’re already five years removed from the peak of Covid madness. Simultaneously, it feels like a different era, perhaps even an alternative reality, and one so proximate to ours as to seem contiguous.

Eddington, a new film by writer-director Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar), returns us to the height of that insanity, while also bringing the insanity to new heights. As I write today for Religion & Liberty, a publication of the Acton Institute, Aster has “delivered a true-to-life re-creation of the weirdnesses of COVID.”

But he has done a bit more than that. Eddington‘s recreation of the discomforts and psychoses of 2020 is unsettlingly realistic. But the movie also elevates that year’s surreality beyond the point of recognizability for the sake of some dark truth-telling. I’m not entirely sure whether that aspect of it works. It’s definitely worth a watch, however. Read my full review here.