In Ari Aster’s movies, the price of understanding how the world really works is your sanity, if not your life. His first three movies—Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau Is Afraid—center on characters whose feeling that there’s something sinister going on beneath the surface of their existence is eventually proved to be correct, but it’s as if their bodies aren’t equipped to contain that knowledge. By the time the credits roll, they’re either dead or catatonic. One way or another, their minds are gone. The people in Aster’s polarizing fourth movie, Eddington, a Western-inflected psychodrama set during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, don’t get off so easy. The stress test of a rapidly spreading virus with no known treatment exposes innumerable cracks in society’s facade: the gap between remote workers and people forced to risk their lives in order to earn a living; between people who breathe a sigh of relief when they see a police car approaching and people who have to be sure to keep their hands in plain sight. But bringing those inequities to light doesn’t make them disappear. The movie’s characters can see how broken the world is, but they’re condemned to keep living in it. COVID broke a lot of things, some more obviously than others. Vaccination rates have tangibly declined; less tangibly, people still seem to drive more recklessly, and more angrily, than they did in 2019. But one of the most profound and long-lasting things the pandemic did is break people’s faith in science and, more crucially, the logic underlying it. As researchers struggled to understand a previously unknown virus—and officials struggled to translate that process into actionable public messaging—it felt as if the advice could shift radically from one day to the next: The virus was airborne or it lingered on surfaces; you didn’t need to worry about masks, then you needed to wear one all the time. Uncertainty is part of science, both as a placeholder for future discoveries and as a reminder that nature is bigger than our minds can encompass. But anxiety abhors a vacuum, and the greater the public’s fear grew, the more desperate we were for clear-cut answers, even if they were the wrong ones. For some, it was less unsettling to believe that Anthony Fauci was part of a vast deep-state conspiracy than it was to accept that the smartest people in the world simply couldn’t figure out what was happening. Eddington drops us right into the swirling waters of early-COVID chaos, and though we may chuckle knowingly when a self-righteous masker reminds his son that the virus can live on paper for days, the movie is less interested in judging or even documenting that period than preserving for posterity what it felt like to live through it. And Aster doesn’t just want to capture that madness. He wants to communicate it, to strip his audience’s sanity away one piece at a time—slow enough that you can feel your mind going but you can’t do anything to stop it. In May 2020, the people of Eddington, New Mexico (population 2,345), are right at the point when the old reality has begun to fracture and a new one is taking hold. Businesses are shuttered and indoor gatherings forbidden, which leaves residents two places to be: out in the streets or at home on their phones. In the streets, the town’s young, mostly white residents gather to protest police violence, spurred on by the murder of George Floyd a thousand miles away. But it’s at home where the movie’s true interests lie. As people seek comfort in virtual communities, their tether to the physical world starts to fray. On the internet, there’s no social distancing, no one to tell you what you can or can’t do, and whatever question you might have, there’s someone who claims to have the answer. Not all of those questions are new. When we first see Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), he’s in his county-issued truck, watching a YouTuber explain what to do when you’re ready to have children and your spouse is not. But up next in his scroll, peeking up from the bottom edge of his glowing screen, is a video about hydroxychloroquine, the junk remedy for COVID-19. Joe, a mild asthmatic who claims he can’t breathe in a mask, will later insist, loudly, that “there is no COVID in Sevilla County,” and for at least some of the movie, he appears to be right. (The county and the town are both fictitious, but Aster grew up in New Mexico and returned home during the pandemic because of what he called “a COVID scare.”) There are no overflowing emergency rooms in Eddington, no piles of corpses or devastated families. But there is madness, which is as contagious as the virus, and just as difficult to treat. The first person we see in Eddington isn’t Joe. It’s an unnamed transient played by Clifton Collins Jr., his face and clothing smeared with dirt, who gazes down on the surrounding hills, then descends on the town, muttering curses under his breath. Lodge, as the credits call him, might as well be plague personified, and indeed, he’s the only one with the telltale dry cough. At least, that is, until a pivotal encounter between him and Joe about halfway through the movie. (Spoilers follow.) Riled up by his humiliation at the hands of the town’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), whom he has decided to challenge for office, Joe drives past the bar Ted owns and finds the front door smashed. Inside, Lodge is ranting almost unintelligibly as he pulls bottles off the shelf, one liquor after another spilling out of his mouth. But he’s not just trying to get drunk. As the liquid pours down his chin, you can hear him cry out, “It all tastes the same.” Then, without any provocation, Joe shoots Lodge dead, wraps his body in plastic, and throws it into the river. After that, Joe starts coughing, and before long, he’s spitting out his morning coffee in disgust. And though Joe never opens the email with the results of his COVID test, we know what they are long before he starts wheezing as if he’s at death’s door. The virus robs Joe of his sense of taste, but even those who aren’t testing positive lose the ability to tell one thing from another: fact from fiction, systemic injustice from far-fetched intrigue. Joe’s mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), is knee-deep in online conspiracy theories, rattling off Facebook posts and forwarded emails about how the government cooked up COVID, Plandemic-style, and 9/11 was a controlled demolition. His wife, Louise (Emma Stone), meanwhile, has fallen under the sway of a grifter guru (Austin Butler) who spins elaborate tales involving Tom Hanks’ birth year and the mayor of Seattle and tells his followers, “You are not a coincidence.” What he means is that things don’t just happen. They have meaning, and if you can’t find one, you just need to look harder. COVID turned us all into conspiracy theorists, one way or another. The first thing you did when you caught the virus was try to figure out who you caught it from, where you let the mask slip. The chances were often just as good you got it from a passing stranger, or someone who was in a room five minutes before you got there. But it’s more reassuring to feel as if you did something wrong than to confront the idea that fate is simply random, that one person dies and another lives for no earthly reason. Anything that felt as if it might be true was better than not knowing at all. Eddington is framed as a Western-style showdown between Joe Cross and Ted Garcia, with the future of the town hanging in the balance. But we can see early on that the town is screwed either way. Sure, Joe is a right-wing loon, a sad and angry man with a gun who compensates for the impotence he feels at home by exerting his power elsewhere. But Ted is a glad-handing hypocrite, scolding others for not wearing masks while bending the rules for his own benefit. There’s something Trumpian, or Boris Johnson–esque, about the way he flouts lockdown rules by holding a meeting in his bar, then insists that it qualifies as “essential business” because the mayor’s office is wherever he happens to be. His big plan for Eddington’s “tech-positive future” involves diverting town funds toward the site of a prospective A.I. data center that would require massive amounts of water to keep it cool, in a county that’s always in the middle of a drought. Conspiracies, in this sense, are real. Mundane, even. We know that deals are made in backrooms every day, between people with more money and power than we can ever hope to possess. But those conspiracies have often already been exposed, and they thrive all the same. So we find or invent new ones, fiendishly intricate, complex knots that give us a rush every time we untangle a strand. They can be terrifying, but in the way a horror movie is—which is why Aster’s movies can toggle so easily between horror and paranoid thriller. Both genres lead us toward knowledge, pulling us, with a sickening mixture of dread and excitement, ever closer to a truth we can’t turn away from, no matter how much we want to. Perhaps we’d never go down to that dark basement or slip past that No Entry sign, but we need our heroes to be braver, or more foolish, than we are. Aster’s movies don’t just unravel conspiracies. They’re built like them. From the occult symbol carved into Hereditary’s fatal telephone pole onward, they’re crammed with details that are decipherable solely after multiple viewings, proof that the evidence was always right in front of us, if only we’d known where to look. But they’re also morbid jokes on the idea that life makes more sense the second time around, given that his characters, like us, get just one shot. Eddington isn’t quite as symbol-mad as Beau Is Afraid, but it bristles with half-seen signs like the copy of The Secret tucked between seats in Joe’s truck—a key indicator, if you happen to catch it, that he’s a man invested in the idea that you can remake reality through sheer belief. Some are hidden clues, some sight gags for Easter egg hunters, and some are warnings about the danger of reading too much into incidental details. The company that wants to build Ted Garcia’s data center is called Solidgoldmagikarp, a name derived from an internet joke about ultrarare Pokémon. But as internet jokes often do, it acquired multiple meanings over time and also refers to a term that, for unknown reasons, causes large language models like ChatGPT to start spouting nonsense. In other words, it’s an A.I. facility named for something that makes A.I. lose its mind. Everyone in Eddington believes they’re on the trail of some vast conspiracy; the characters all think they’re the lead in an Ari Aster movie. But Joe finds an actual conspiracy, or at least falls victim to it. After he kills Lodge in the bar, Joe murders Ted and his teenage son with a long-range rifle, then frames one of his deputies for the crime. But while he’s away from the station, someone sets a blaze outside—a literal dumpster fire—and uses the distraction to spring his patsy. When Joe tracks the deputy down, he’s standing in the middle of the desert, a drone hovering ominously overhead. The deputy can’t speak, but he tries to warn Joe off—too late to prevent him from triggering a massive explosion. As Joe, deafened by the blast, struggles to regain his senses, Aster cuts to the drone’s point of view, where we can see flames igniting a message already traced in the dirt with gasoline: NO PEACE. The rest of the movie unfolds as a brutal, comically gory gunfight—think the Coens’ No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading playing on top of each other—between Joe and a number of masked assailants whose motives never become clear. But we do get a hint as to who’s behind it all. Just before the explosion, the movie cuts abruptly to the inside of a passing jet, where a figure in tactical gear is watching the plan unfold. There’s a stack of signs in the aisle reading “The White Man Is the Virus, Here Comes the Cure,” and the unidentified figure’s backpack bears a patch reading “I Am Duncan Lemp,” a slogan used by far-right militias that invokes the name of a self-identified Three Percenter killed by police in a no-knock raid. Are both the left and the right being manipulated by the same mysterious entity? And if so, who on earth could it be? The logical inference, as Nate Jones suggests at Vulture, is that the A.I. company, or big business more broadly, is behind it all. After that climactic shoot-out, which winds up with Joe taking a knife to the top of his skull, the movie skips forward to Joe, now the mayor, presiding over the ribbon cutting for the Supermagikarp facility. His brain injury has rendered him incapable of movement or speech, but his mother is happy to act as his mouthpiece, and a local power broker watches approvingly from the back of the crowd. Warren (King Orba) was once Ted’s main financial backer, but now he’s got Joe in his pocket, and the end result is the same: The rich get what they always wanted. But while you can draw that conclusion, I think Eddington means to leave you just short of being able to put all the pieces together. By the end of the shoot-out, we’re fully inside Joe’s point of view, to the extent that, when he methodically scans the street for assailants, the camera spins with him, and all we hear on the soundtrack is his COVID-ravaged lungs gasping for air. That’s to say, it’s not that what we’re seeing isn’t real, but that we’ve lost the ability to tell what is from what isn’t. Aster doesn’t mean to suggest, even within this context of his absurdist farce, that anti-racists and anti-vaxxers are all puppets dangling from the same set of strings. (Nor, although some have raised the concern, is he making fun of Black Lives Matter as a whole; he’s very specifically targeting the kind of white liberals who rushed out to buy Ibram X. Kendi books but never got around to reading them.) He is, however, acknowledging that neither side has a monopoly on conspiratorial thinking, and that thinking can turn people against each other who might otherwise find themselves united against a common enemy. For those positioned to exploit unrest for their own gain, the “no justice” part is optional. It’s the “no peace” that matters. And so this tiny town gets its A.I. data center, soaking up water and power while it spits out dehumanized slop that looks and sounds like truth, even when it isn’t. No one’s any closer to being happy or fulfilled, to living in a world that’s more harmonious or more fair, but they’ve got a nifty new tool that lets them think less and consume more, that commingles reality and delusion so thoroughly it’s not worth the effort to try and separate them. Garbage in, garbage out.