It’s unhinged, disturbingly funny, and probably the most important American film of the year.

T here’s a bumper sticker on Sheriff Joe Cross’s SUV that reads: “DON’T LET EDDINGTON, NM TURN INTO FACEBOOK, NM.” It hasn’t been poll-tested, but it’s oddly perceptive — a microcosm of Ari Aster’s new film and of American life itself: We resent the algorithm, warn others about it, yet we keep scrolling.

A24’s latest plays like Paddy Chayefsky, Paul Verhoeven, Sam Peckinpah, and the Coen Brothers were locked inside Los Pollos Hermanos with a Wi-Fi password and a vial of “secret sauce” that glows in the dark. The nearly two-and-a-half-hour movie is a fever dream of rage and absurdity. It’s unhinged, disturbingly funny, and probably the most important American film of the year.

Aster says he wrote the screenplay while doomscrolling on Twitter during the pandemic — no surprise there. Set in New Mexico during the twitchy summer of 2020, it begins as a small-town pandemic squabble and spirals — plausibly, alarmingly — into an apparent Antifa siege. Joaquin Phoenix plays Cross, the soft-spoken, asthmatic sheriff with the dazed stare of a man losing arguments in his own head. He can’t make love to his wife. He can’t put his phone down. He can’t even sit in his patrol car maskless without being accused of bio-terrorism.

But he can run for mayor.

Joe’s up against Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), a self-styled “tech-positive” liberal whose campaign ads are as slick as a fistful of Purell. Alongside local powerbroker Warren Sandoval (King Orba), he’s pushing to bring a data center to town. The locals are uneasy, but their resistance is drowned out by a mix of civic inertia, digital noise, and the toxic pull of culture war distractions.

The closest thing to opposition is Joe himself, but he’s closer to Will & Grace than Will Kane. A joke at home and in town — hell, even the teens mock him. The man is a shambling bundle of hang-ups with no vision, just a vague sense that something’s gone wrong. Think Howard Beale in a Stetson, mumbling through monologues not even he understands. If it all feels familiar, that’s the point. Aster spent months crisscrossing New Mexico studying his subjects.

The film unfolds in the wake of George Floyd’s death, as a local BLM chapter organizes made-for-Instagram demonstrations. The kids behind them mean well, but their ideas run about as deep as their phone batteries. Some are there to date; others just left second-period history. In one of the funniest scenes of the year, a teen lectures his parents about “dismantling whiteness” over mashed potatoes. The father’s deadpan response — gun rack in frame — brings the house down.

Eddington may skewer performative progressives, but don’t expect Libs of TikTok: The Movie. The reactionary right takes it on the chin, too. Enter Dawn, Joe’s mother-in-law, a walking 4Chan thread who sounds like she hotboxes expired Ivermectin through MyPillow cases while insisting Brigitte Macron made a cameo in Sleepaway Camp (if you know, you know). When she isn’t dabbling in numerology, she’s busy pushing her already unstable daughter, Louise (Emma Stone), over the edge.

Stone disappears into the role, but Louise is written less as a character than as a narrative tripwire in Joe’s demise. Her most revealing scenes are with Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), a New Age Waco-inspired guru loosely modeled on Russell Brand, who podcasts about elite pedophile rings between microdosing retreats. If you’ve been online lately, it’s disturbingly plausible. What strains credulity is that Joe could be married to her for years and know so little about her.

But Eddington isn’t concerned with literalism so much as with truths revealed through poetry. One of Aster’s sharpest insights is that everyone in town is just an avatar of the media siloes they inhabit (another great reason to support National Review). Joe is pretty much who Die Hard’s Hans Gruber had in mind as “another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he’s John Wayne.” Ted is, aptly, a walking TED Talk. Louise and Dawn’s brains have been scrambled by right-wing grifters, while the BLM kids are basically Robin DiAngelo soundbites in human form.

They might share a zip code, but not much else. What binds them is a void. Faith is conspicuously missing — and not just because “slow the spread” shut down churches. The same director who gave us Hereditary and Midsommar — and surveys every collapsing institution in a state more devout than Kansas — didn’t just forget spirituality. He’s pointing out its absence. Louise prays once, but to whom is anyone’s guess. Like many in real life, the film’s characters fill the God-shaped holes in their hearts with a digital diet of rage, rabbit holes, and conspiratorial lunacy. That sense of substitution is rendered with eerie precision by Darius Khondji’s arresting cinematography. Whereas church steeples would often crowned the horizon in classic Westerns like My Darling Clementine, in Eddington, it’s a blinking cell tower.

John Ford’s shadow looms large. Yet in a film saturated with screens, we rarely see a movie. The lone exception comes in the coda, after a third act that plays like a cracked-out Call of Duty mission. There, a black-and-white clip from Young Mr. Lincoln flickers onscreen — a mournful elegy for a civic mythos we’ve lost.

You’d think a portrait this searing of American life would be hailed by critics — but like RoboCop, Repo Man, and They Live before it, Eddington seems more destined for cult status than the awards circuit. Some in the predominantly left-leaning commentariat have even called it “mean” and “divisive.” Not because it critiques liberals (they loved Get Out) but because it does so while sympathizing with people they’ve long since written off. On a podcast, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis went so far as shouting “F*** you, Ari Aster!” — the kind of screech not heard since the night Jane Fonda howled at her television after Reagan won 49 states.

Discerning cinephiles of all stripes — including culture-forward conservatives like Meghan McCain and Ben Domenech — have embraced the film. The grifter right, meanwhile, has largely ignored it — not out of offense, but out of self-preservation. Eddington calls out the resentment racket they depend on. That’s bad for business. Their silence should give us hope. A loss for them — and for their left-wing counterparts — is a win for American sanity.

The film works precisely because it has no sacred cows — and not out of a false sense of “balance.” Every one of Eddington’s uppercuts is earned. It lays bare how an unholy trinity of tech giants, empty suits, and grievance peddlers have turned the public square into Nurse Ratched’s ward. I can’t promise you’ll feel good after watching it — truths like these rarely comfort — but maybe that’s exactly why you should. Afterwards, consider sitting somewhere quiet. Maybe even in a pew. God knows we need it.