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Eddington is a Black Comedy Neo-Western film. It is written and directed by Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar). It stars Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Austin Butler, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O'Connell, Micheal Ward, Clifton Collins Jr., William Belleau, Cameron Mann, Matt Gomez Hidaka, Amelie Hoeferle, and Robyn Casper.

Welcome to the town of Eddington, New Mexico. Things aren't the best right now, as it's currently May of 2020 and the COVID-19 Pandemic has entered full swing, but things get even more complicated when town sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix) decides to run for mayor, which sparks a conflict between him and incumbent mayor and hopeful re-elect Ted Garcia (Pascal). Caught in the middle of it is Joe’s emotionally volatile wife Louise (Stone), conspiracy theorist mother-in-law Dawn (O’Connell) and radical cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak (Butler). Additionally, protests are starting to pop up everywhere after yet another incident of police brutality in the Midwest turned fatal and has inflamed racial tensions to outright explosive heights. Combined with this new conflict, the protests, and the overall powder keg that is building up within the residents as neighbor is pitted against neighbor, it won't take much before the tensions boil over and things really escalate.The movie, produced by Square Peg (Ari Aster and Lars Knudsen), 828 Productions, and distributed by A24 (who also produces), premiered at Cannes on May 16th, 2025, and had its wide release on July 18th, 2025.

Previews: Teaser Trailer, Official Trailer, Second Trailer

Tropes featured in Eddington include:

• 20 Minutes into the Past: The film is set in May 2020, five years and two months before its release date. Three months into the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown and deals with the events of that year. Characters also participate in or react to Black Lives Matter Movement protests, with the words "No Justice, No Peace" (a slogan first coined with the 1986 Howard Beach racial attack but more commonly associated with the Black Lives Matter protests in the 2020s) becoming Arc Words. We also see debates over lockdowns, COVID-related conspiracy theories, and Bernie Sanders, and the whole thing is framed as Sheriff Cross doom-scrolling through his Instagram feed.
• Aborted Arc: The question over Ted's true intentions, and particularly the fate of his missing wife, is left completely ambiguous. The story implies that it's going to follow her disappearance until Joe kills Ted and Eric halfway through the film.
• Advertised Extra:
  • Pedro Pascal gets second billing after Phoenix. The film treats him as the second lead of the film until he's killed halfway through.
  • Austin Butler gets the "with" credit although his role is essentially The Cameo.
• Ambiguous Situation: One of Sheriff Joe's deputies died from Fentanyl. Mayor Garcia calls it an overdose, implying the deputy was taking confiscated drugs, while Joe insists it was "fentanyl exposure" implying an accident and invoking the belief that Fentanyl can be lethal from just skin contact.
• And I Must Scream: The ultimate fate of Joe Cross. After being stabbed in the head, he is left a mute and near-completely immobile vegetable, although implied to be fully conscious of what is happening around him. Additionally, he's now being taken care of by his conspiracy nut mother-in-law who claims to speak for him and is acting as mayor in his stead to push her own radical agenda, she sleeps in the same bed as him and has sex with his nurse (who is also physically abusing Joe), and he's forced by her to watch a video featuring his estranged wife now pregnant with the child of a cult leader.
• Arc Words:
  • "Where's your mask?"
  • "That's not six feet."
• Armor-Piercing Question: Cross launches his mayoral campaign against Ted Garcia, the incumbent mayor has only this to say:
  Mayor Garcia: You can't keep your own office going, but you're gonna run mine?
• Artistic License – History: The proposed data center project is from a fictional company named SolidGoldMagikarp, a reference to a token that caused surprising failures and strange outputs in some versions of OpenAI's GPT LLMs. It's not uncommon for tech companies to use referential names like that, but OpenAI didn't release its first LLM until November 2022, and the SolidGoldMagikarp issue was discovered much later and wasn't widely known until a February 2023 blog post, nearly three years after the film's May 2020 setting. However, you could also interpret the name as SolidGoldMagikarp as an out-of-universe reference, drawing a parallel between how the project disrupts the Eddington community and causes strange happenings the same way that the token did to GPT. Especially if you believe the idea that SolidGoldMagikarp hired the "Antifa" supersoldiers to take out Cross after Garcia's death because they didn't want an opponent of the project to become mayor.
• Artistic License – Law: Cross accuses Garcia of getting Louise pregnant when she was 16, which he says is statutory rape. Michael is also reluctant to admit that his ex-girlfriend is not yet 18. In New Mexico, the age of consent is 16, not 18.
• Artistic License – Politics: Cross's decision to challenge Garcia for re-election is so impulsive that, after he announces his campaign, he has to ask one of his deputies to figure out how to get him on the ballot. But Cross is sheriff, which is an elected position nearly everywhere in the US, so he's surely run for office before and would already know how that works.
• Asshole Victim: Practically every character that dies is a horrible person and has it coming. And then there's the ultimate fate of Joe.
• Badass Native: Butterfly Jimenez isn't exactly an action star, but he's established to be a much more competent police officer and detective than Joe Cross.
• The Bad Guy Wins:
  • While he Did Not Get the Girl, Brian ends up finding compensation as a wealthy right-wing influencer on social media with a new girlfriend and a new platform with influence and clout. He doesn't win Sarah's affections but his new political alignment is in power in Eddington, as opposed to Sarah's.
  • As is typical in other Aster films, Vernon, the charismatic and charming cult leader ends up winning. He seduces Joe's wife, gets her to abandon their marriage, and then impregnates her and adds her to his harem, while Joe is left paralyzed and infirm Forced to Watch.
  • To the extent that it is directly villainous, SolidGoldMagicKarp gets the valuable contract it sought as a data center despite its environmental degradation. Despite losing its liberal backer in Ted Garcia, like all Big Tech companies it pivots Right with Dawn, Joe's mother-in-law, who ends up inheriting the mayoralty, controls Joe's body for the rest of his life and has sex in the same bed with the male nurse with Joe left hopelessly incontinent.
• Bait-and-Switch: When Joe stumbles back home after the brutal Antifa attack, he spots a shadowy figure inside and aims his gun, the silhouette teasingly resembling Louise in a moment of wishful thinking on his part, but a closer look reveals it's actually her mom Dawn, shattering that fleeting hope and pulling him back to his grim reality.
• Bitch Slap: When Joe goes to stop the party at Mayor Garcia's house, the pair turn the music ("Firework" by Katy Perry) off and back on again, until Ted just steps forward and gives Joe a light but firm slap, and then a couple more until he gets the message and leaves.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: None of the various factions of the film come off squeaky clean, but generally have understandable reasons for their actions. Joe's actions however, his growing extremism and Sanity Slippage places him more firmly towards the darker edges of morality than a Grey-and-Gray Morality system.
  • Joe Cross appears to genuinely believe he's defending his townspeople against unfair conditions and governmental mistreatment. But his obsession with Louise and Ted's former relationship continues to strain his marital life, his pride drives him to murder, and he proves willing to betray even his closest friends to save his own skin, transforming him into the film's Villain Protagonist.
  • Ted Garcia is more-or-less a typical West-Coast/Sunbelt Liberal. Socially liberal on cultural war issues, civic-minded in protecting his town from Covid, and enough sense of decorum to stay away from personally attacking Joe or his family in the press. But he also has a chauvinist streak, dismissive of Louise's personal traumas, fails to push his own family i.e. his son to follow COVID mandates, and likewise he banks his campaign on a blind support for Big Tech, in the form of an AI data center, which puts both Eddington and the nearby towns in ecological danger.
  • On one hand, the Eddington protestors largely contain disaffected white teens who barely seem to understand the racial issues they're discussing and largely appear motivated by wanting to seem morally righteous. On the other hand, Ted Garcia points out that most of the Eddington police force have been fired for excessive violence, and possibly consuming the very drugs they've confiscated. Deputy Michael ends up being harassed by both groups, with both factions insisting he belongs on their side out of entitlement.
• Black Comedy: True to Ari Aster's style, the film mines dark humor from the absurdity of 2020's overlapping crises. Teenagers spout half-understood social justice buzzwords, Dawn prints out conspiracy theory articles and forces her daughter to read them aloud to prove she's paying attention, and Joe decorates his police cruiser with grammatically incorrect campaign signs including "Your Being Manipulated." The comedy comes from how seriously everyone takes their ridiculous positions.
• Blatant Lies: Sheriff Cross' press conference about the murders of Ted and Eric Garcia sees him grandstand about the murders being left-wing terrorists and warning them against coming to Eddington when the murders were committed by Joe himself.
• Boomerang Bigot: A Running Gag has white BLM members deliver polemics about how white people are evil and need to be brought down. The Antifa terrorists' plane has a sign proclaiming that they are the "cure" for the "plague" of white people even though every passenger on the plane is white.
• Boom, Headshot!: Keeping with tradition, Ari Aster's penchant for head-based violence utilizes this trope numerous times throughout the film.
• Broken Bird: Louise is traumatized to the point of being almost catatonic most days about something that happened to her in the past, very possibly Parental Incest from her father.
• Category Traitor: Deputy Michael faces accusations of this from two sides: the anti-police protestors think he's a race traitor, while his colleague Deputy Guy starts questioning his loyalty to the department as the protests spread.
• Chekhov's Skill: Cross has framed a target practice silhouette displaying his "record" with a rifle and asserts that Michael will never beat it. Later in the film, Cross will murder Garcia and his son using a rifle from extreme range. He also uses Michael's habit of training with a rifle to frame him as the murderer.
• Community-Threatening Construction: How Cross and Paula, the anti-Garcia councilmember, see the SolidGoldMagikarp project, arguing that it will burden local water resources and be a giveaway of taxpayer money. Garcia, Warren, and the Pueblo tribe see it as crucial economic development. The film doesn't portray either view as more correct than the other.
• Conspiracy Theorist:
  • The film is bookended by audio clips of a conspiracy theorist podcast, early on discussing Gematria and the number 56 in relation to recent events, and later how a 5G signal will soon activate nanoparticles in vaccinated people causing them to get sick and die. The voice of the podcaster is actually Ari Aster.
  • The Cross household is a spectrum of conspiracy beliefs. Dawn is a fervent true believer who bombards her daughter and her son-in-law with videos and print-outs of articles, checking her daughter's phone to see if she has read what she sent her, and is also locally infamous for her rants on social media. Her daughter Louise is seduced by Vernon's theories of Pedophile Networks because of her own trauma, which in turn her mother vehemently rejects. Joe Cross in turn thinks of himself as the Only Sane Man of the household but also thinks the pandemic and the protests are a part of a Government Conspiracy.
  • Vernon is the leader of a small cult centered around recovering Repressed Memories of being subject to horrific sexual abuse as children, that are also implied to be either fully false or exaggerated.
  • Deputy Guy believes the protests are a Staged Populist Uprising, while Sarah, one of the lead figures of the protests thinks the looting and vandalism are a right-wing False Flag Operation to condition the people to accept martial law. Weirdly enough, both are partially Right for the Wrong Reasons.
• Conspiracy Thriller: While the film starts out like a Paranoid Thriller, after the murders of Ted and Eric Garcia become national news the actual conspiracy shows up.
• Cope by Creating: Louise's odd-looking dolls and paintings are implied to be a way for her to express her trauma. She mentions she started doing them when she was 10.
• Corrupt Cop: Joe Cross is implied and openly shown being thoroughly unprofessional and indifferent to upholding his office even before he becomes a homicidal maniac and a criminal. Garcia notes that his office is in disarray and has multiple arrests, he's shown scorning the legally required mask mandates, and tacitly encourages others to break the law. He's also shown to be distinctly racist toward Native American policemen. He does seem to be personally liked by his co-officers, especially Michael but this is shown to be entirely superficial by the end. When he murders Lodge and then Ted Garcia and his son, he tries to frame Michael for the crime and was willing to set him up to be the fall guy for his own actions.
• Corrupt Politician: Ted and his cabinet are heavily implied to be selling the town and surrounding land out to the SolidGoldMagikarp data center in exchange for a profit. Their replacements, Joe and Deirdre, are even worse. Joe (while a vegetable) is a murderer and Deirdre is taking advantage of his condition to spread QAnon-esque conspiracy theories.
• Crazy Homeless Person: Lodge is a known local fixture, a gray-haired, disheveled man who limps around spouting gibberish. He's also implied to be a carrier of Covid-19.
• Disposable Vagrant: Both Ted and Joe think the other has the responsibility to deal with Lodge, and when he stumbles into the BLM Eddington protest, the high-minded social justice activist teens all just fall away from him. Finally, when Sheriff Joe sees Lodge had broken into Mayor Ted's bar, he shoots the man dead, cleans the crime scene, and dumps the body in a river.
• Disposing of a Body: After shooting a delusional sick vagrant dead when he broke in the bar, Joe puts his corpse in a body bag and dumps him in a river.
• Distant Epilogue: The epilogue jumps forward one year after the main events. Joe is now technically mayor of Eddington, but completely paralyzed and non-verbal from being stabbed in the head. Dawn acts as his "spokesperson" and caretaker, using his incapacitated body as a puppet to push her increasingly unhinged conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, Brian has become a right-wing influencer after his "heroic" shooting was caught on video, and Louise appears pregnant with cult leader Vernon's child. Joe got everything he wanted and lost everything that mattered.
• Doesn't Know Their Lover: Sheriff Joe Cross is estranged from his wife Louise, who doesn't want to have any physical contact with him. Louise makes odd dolls and paintings to Cope by Creating but instead of engaging with the artwork, Joe just arranges a friend of one of his employees to buy some off her webstore to give her an illusion of people liking her art. These things are symptoms of her sexual trauma that is heavily implied to be from Parental Incest by her late father but Joe tries to weaponize it to fling against his personal rival and political opponent, which proves to be The Last Straw for her, and she then packs her bags and leaves with Vernon and his followers and posts a video online rebuking Joe's accusations against Ted.
• Dope Slap: As Joe's caretaker carries him to the toilet in the final moments of the film, Joe's right hand shoots up in reflex and grazes him. The caretaker responds with an irritated slap upside the head, then immediately apologizes.
• Downer Ending: Ted and Eric's deaths are never pinned on Joe, he finally gets to be Eddington's mayor, the thing he's dreamed about for so long, Michael survives but looks heavily traumatized from the events, Brian becomes a virulently racist alt-right figurehead and his role in gunning down the extremist attacking Joe gets him a decent sized fanbase, and overall, a lot of wanton destruction and unnecessary deaths, all for the sake of one man's ego and trigger-finger. The only good thing to come out of the whole ordeal is that the extremist's attacks on Joe left him a paralyzed vegetable, effectively making him a neutralized threat, but even then, Dawn takes full advantage of this by spreading her batshit insane conspiracy theories under the guise of being "his own".
• Entertainingly Wrong: After the Garcia murders, everyone in town develops logical but completely incorrect theories about who did it. Brian thinks Deputy Michael committed the crime out of jealousy, reasoning that seeing Eric kiss Sarah and receiving Brian's Instagram DM showing the photo was Michael's Rage Breaking Point. Deputy Guy also suspects Michael but for different reasons, believing racial animus sparked by the BLM protests drove him to kill the Hispanic mayor and his son. Meanwhile, Dawn is convinced Vernon Jefferson Peak is responsible and fears she's next as revenge for Louise's abuse. Each theory makes perfect sense based on what the characters know—they're just all completely wrong.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • Much of the cast's motivations and neuroses are established by the content they consume, whether it be on the screen or otherwise.
    • Joe is introduced essentially blowing off work in his car, watching YouTube videos about convincing your spouse to have children. While Joe's pride and politics play a good role in his behavior, his obsession with trying to find the "right" way to fix his family issues holds the largest motivators of his actions. His failure to properly support Louise's struggles and simply convince her that his methods are working costs him not only his relationship with his wife, but the last thing holding him back from extremism.
    • Ted Garcia's desktop screen is shown to be largely empty outside Discord and Steam, emphasizing his focus on technology at the expense of broader small-town interests.
    • Dawn's first scene shows her blasting various Conspiracy Theorist rhetoric while she's asleep, with articles printed out to physically force her housemates to interact with her worldview and theories.
    • Louise consumes spiritual-adjacent and self-help videos, which she quickly turns off once Joe arrives home. Not only does this imply her future relationship with the cultist Vernon, it shows how she doesn't trust Joe to help her through her ongoing psychological problems.
    • Deputy Michael Cooke discusses promoting Bitcoin in Joe's political campaign, indicating a generally apolitical nature that puts him at odds with the small town factionalism.
    • Brian watches romantic advice videos to attract girls. While he later takes on the language of progressive movements, his primary interest is getting laid and proves ready to pivot towards the opposite side of the political spectrum as soon as it's convenient for him.
    • Officer Butterly is never shown on his phone and chides Joe for not working to unite the resources of both departments to provide better service to both their communities. This not only emphasizes Butterfly's capabilities as an officer, but that he's willing to put factional differences aside in order to focus on the truth.
    • Sarah is first seen on a TikTok video quietly dancing to a caption about having just finished reading Giovanni's Room
  • Joe's first scene of him performing his duties as a Sherriff involve him being called in by Ted to deal with Lodge, a belligerent homeless man who is attempting to intrude on a town meeting. Once Joe arrives he immediately begins arguing with Ted over the legal technicalities of him hosting the meeting in a bar during lockdown, completely ignoring Lodge who breaks into the locked bar while they're busy bickering. With no choice now but to physically intervene, Joe tries to subdue and arrest Lodge, only to be easily and humiliatingly overpowered by him while the town council look on, with nobody intervening or even helping Joe up after Lodge leaves of his own volition. Joe is an ineffectual police officer, isn't respected by the townspeople, and his one-sided rivalry with Ted leads to him making poor, impulsive decisions which only wind up hurting himself and will eventually end with Joe snapping and resorting to murder.
• "Eureka!" Moment: Officer Butterfly Jimenez is already suspicious of Sheriff Joe over his behavior at the Garcia crime scene but his suspicions are confirmed, when while waiting at the office, he notices the distinct way Sheriff Joe had written the letter E on a white board similar to the graffiti left at the Garcia house.
• Everyone Has Standards: Dawn spends all day, every day, watching and regurgitating outlandish conspiracy theories. She takes Louise to see Vernon Jefferson Peak speak but finds the things he says too bizarre and upsetting even for her and becomes alarmed when Louise gets riled up by him.
• Everytown, America: Eddington, New Mexico, is portrayed as an average small town with a formerly Close-Knit Community that gets caught in some infights thanks to the Corona pandemic and the BLM protests.
• Faceless Goons: The mysterious Antifa militants that show up in town never show their faces or have any spoken lines.
• False Flag Operation: Halfway through the movie Joe Cross murders Mayor Garcia and his teenage son in cold blood and stages the crime scene by painting "NO JUSTICE NO PEACE" on the wall, as well as stealing an engraved watch from the crime scene that he later plants on Michael. After the story gets reported in national news, suddenly we see a private plane full of black-clad men with anti-fascist patches on their backpacks heading to the town, and when Joe later finds one of their phones, he sees videos of them committing a number of previous acts that had specifically riled up Deputy Guy.
• False Rape Accusation: Dawn in the past accused Ted Garcia of taking advantage of Louise, while Ted denies they ever even had sex, and it is implied that Louise's pregnancy was the result of Parental Incest. Joe tries to pry into the issue after seeing Louise get fired up when talking about the evils of pedophilia but when she doesn't respond, he then takes to himself to publicly accuse Mayor Garcia the next day in a public speech, which then prompts Louise to leave him, and post a video online rebuking the accusation against Ted.
• Foil: Fitting their antagonist relationship, Sheriff Joe Cross and Mayor Ted Garcia demonstrate both clear similarities and obvious points where they diverge. Both men try to maintain polite, agreeable appearances in public, both are trying to protect the townspeople in their own way, both have spousal issues that the town enjoys gossiping over, and both display major anger issues and an obsessive need for control. Both of them are also in danger of hurting Eddington's civilians, either through the ecological damage of Ted's data center plans or through Joe's increasing instability and tendency towards violence. However, Ted insists on never stooping to personal attacks against Louise, considering it needlessly cruel. Joe ultimately proves not only willing to drag his wife into his conflict with Ted he becomes outright murderous and overtly corrupt in his thirst for power and revenge.
• Frame-Up: Joe first tries to frame [BLM for the murders of Ted and Eric. Then, in order to point suspicion away from himself in the murders of the Garcias, Joe plants evidence in Deputy Michael's car.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • The proposed campaign slogans for Joe's mayoral campaign include "See ya Garcia! Or Gar- SEE YA!", "Make New Mexico not OLD Mexico Again!" "You wana[sic] live in San Francisco?[also sic] I didn't [unlegible]", "Ted Garcia Chinese Honeymoon 1988 look it up!" and "Rather be dead than dumb!"
  • Joe's campaign placards are similarly unhinged. We get a good shot of "Your Being Manipulated" but blink-and-you-miss-it shots include "Don't let Eddington, NM turn into Facebook, NM", "What You Don't Remember Paying For a New Road and Data Center? But You Did!" and "For your Mayor, How About your Sheriff?" as well as a huge billboard on top which accuses Mayor Ted "working for the Governor, who works for [Bill Gates]".
• Fury-Fueled Foolishness: Sheriff Cross accuses the mayor of sexually exploiting Louise, Joe's wife who briefly dated Ted when she was younger, in a public speech that he also posts online. This prompts Louise to leave Joe to go travel with cult leader Vernon, and to post a rebuttal of the claim online.
• Genre Shift: The film begins as a satirical character study about small-town politics during COVID lockdown, then shifts into a murder mystery after the Garcia killings, before finally transforming into an action thriller when the armed terrorists arrive. Each shift keeps audiences off-balance, never quite sure what kind of movie they're watching.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Despite all the tensions between Joe, Ted, the protestors, the Pueblo tribal police, and the wider growing political conflicts, SolidGoldMagikarp proves to be an overwhelming threat to Eddington's future. The town's factional politics and interpersonal dramas prevent them from uniting a proper defense against the corporate interests overtaking their area. Even the final threat of the (alleged) Antifa extremists ultimately pave the way for SolidGoldMagikarp to push through with their data center plans. Whether SolidGoldMagikarp sent the assailants themselves as a False Flag Operation or merely used their presence to their own benefit, the company emerges as the only organization that is never hindered for a moment by the chaos in Eddington.
• Gun Nut: Not only does Joe invoke this at one point by saying that the people of Eddington love guns, but near the climax we are introduced to a gun shop named "GUNTHERS" where all sorts of guns and weapons are sold. We never see the owner of the shop, though.
• Happier Home Movie: At his absolute lowest, reeling from Louise leaving him and the public humiliation, Joe curls up in bed and replays his wedding video on his laptop, lingering on footage of Louise's genuinely smiling face. It's a painful reminder of better times before conspiracy theories, political ambitions, and buried trauma poisoned their marriage beyond repair.
• Hates Their Parent: Louise is trapped having her mother live with her and her husband and is exhausted with her obsession with conspiracy theories, and most likely her either [[willful ignorance or active cover-up willful ignorance or active cover-up of what Louise's father, Dawn's husband did to her as a child. And needless to say, while Dawn venerates her dead husband, Louise does not share her nostalgia for the dead ex-Sheriff]].
• Hollywood Provincialism: The likely reason why 18 is portrayed as the age of consent in New Mexico rather than 16 is that that's what it is in California.
• Humiliation Conga: Sheriff Joe Cross makes his False Rape Accusation against Mayor Ted at a campaign event at a restaurant and posts it online, but is mostly met with just confused silence by the audience. Returning home, his wife Louise has packed his bags and called the Conspiracy Theorist Cult to come pick her up, and the next day posts a video online rebuking Joe's claims. Joe is then called for a noise complaint at Mayor Ted's house, and when he gets there, the party-goers are watching Louise's video on the big screen, and after a struggle over the volume control on the PA system, Ted calmly Bitch Slaps Joe, until he gets the point and leaves, but in a last humiliation, the big campaign signs on top of Joe's car get caught on the branches of a tree in the driveway, as he speeds off, getting knocked down in front of the staring party-goers.
• Hypocritical Humor: Brian's speech at the Ted and Eric Garcia memorial:
  Brian: As a white man, I should sit down and listen, which I plan to do, right after this speech, that I have no right to give.
• Implied Death Threat: After the deaths of Garcia and his son, Sheriff Joe Cross delivers this message to the press:
  Cross: If you value your life, you should think twice. Because the people of Eddington like guns. And I encourage them to own guns. And they're going to be in their homes tonight with their guns loaded. And if you try to break into their homes to steal, to set fire, to commit physical injury and/or death, then I'm highly recommending that they blow you out of their homes with their guns.
• Indian Burial Ground: A play on the trope; when running away from the Antifa supersoldiers sheriff Joe Cross jumps on a roof of a building that gives way, and he lands on a museum exhibit of Geronimo’s bones.
• Internet-Induced Idiocy: A problem in the Cross household, with Sheriff Joe, his wife Louisa and mother-in-law Dawn being respectively deeper in online disinformation holes, with Dawn also having a reputation locally for going on unhinged conspiracy rants on Facebook.
• Introspective Art: Louisa Cross, the wife of the protagonist Sheriff Joe, paints and makes dolls of weird pale creatures with no mouths that are heavily implied to reflect her trauma from being sexually abused as a child most likely by her father. Joe tries to encourage her by having a proxy buy some dolls through her web shop, but when charismatic Conspiracy Theorist Cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak visits the house, he seems to understand her art much more intimately which impresses Louisa.
• In-Universe Factoid Failure: Vernon spins a tragic yarn about two cult members who were supposedly abused in the same basement and unknowingly reconnected as adults, claiming they are heading to Belgium to testify at an international criminal court. However, the International Criminal Court is famously located in The Hague, Netherlands. While mislocating a country isn't definitive proof that he is intentionally lying about the survivors themselves, the geographic blunder immediately casts doubt on the legitimacy of his story.
• Jurisdiction Friction:
  • In the very first scene, Cross is confronted by police from a neighboring city who assert that he's within their city limits and therefore required to wear a mask. Only when they threaten to step out of their cruiser does he comply.
  • The murder of Ted and Eric occurs along the border of Pueblo tribal land, so while the deaths occurred in the county, the perpetrator is quickly established to have been on tribal land. Cross and a tribal police officer argue over whose authority the investigation is under, and the Tribal police even threaten to call in the FBI and BIA ^note Bureau of Indian Affairs.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: Ted is killed by a sniper bullet while he is in the middle of a lecture to his son from the comfort of his living room chair.
• Left for Dead: Joe notices that Deputy Michael is still alive after the explosion but deliberately chooses not to help him. Later, we learn that Michael survived, retroactively sharpening the moral weight of Joe's choice.
• Lighter and Softer: Make no mistake, this is not to say it's "happier" or "brighter" than most of Aster's directorial efforts, but compared to other films, Eddington is Aster’s first non-horror film and therefore much less disturbing than his other works. Unlike his other films, the protagonist and all the characters that die are utterly horrible people Michael, the only decent character by the end is scarred, but he survives, and him practicing guns suggests that he might turn to a force of resistance in the new oligarchical world run by SolidGoldMagikarp. He's the first decent character in all of Aster's films to make it through the end of the film alive.
• Literal Metaphor: When the mysterious black-clad operatives spring Deputy Michael from his cell, they cause a distraction by lighting a literal Trash Fire by torching the Sheriff's station's trash container.
• Love Quadrangle: Sarah used to be involved with Deputy Michael. Brian has a crush on Sarah, but she's more interested in Eric. Eric sends Brian a picture of them kissing, which Brian then forwards to Michael. When Eric is shot and killed alongside his father, Brian assumes Michael did it out of jealousy, and Deputy Guy is willing to accept the Instagram DM of the picture as evidence.
• Male Frontal Nudity: We see Joe naked in the epilogue when he is carried to the toilet by his caretaker, highlighting his complete loss of dignity and autonomy in his new existence as a paralyzed vegetable.
• Malicious Misnaming: Deputy Guy insults Tribal police officer Butterfly Jimenez by calling him "Detective Butterball" at one point.
• Manipulative Editing: Eric Garcia posts a screenshot from video taken during Joe's humiliating confrontation with Lodge the vagrant at the bar. The freeze-frame makes it look like Joe is committing police brutality when he was actually getting his ass kicked by an unarmed homeless man. The local BLM protesters later circulate this deceptive image as "evidence" of Sheriff Cross's violent nature.
• Mayor Pain: Mayor Garcia, or at least Joe pictures him as one, accusing him of tormenting the townsfolk with his Corona regulations. This is the main reason Joe wants to run for office in the first place. He may have a point because it's heavily implied throughout the movie that Garcia is a Corrupt Politician who sells out the town to a big corporation. When Joe finally becomes mayor, he is no better, as while he is a vegetable at the time, Dawn functions as his caretaker and spokesperson, and she not only seals the deal with the corporation in Joe's name but uses her new position to spread her conspiracy theories.
• Minority Police Officer: Michael is the sole black character and is also a police officer in Eddington, New Mexico. Joe promotes him in the summer of 2020, which raises concerns for Michael that he's being promoted solely for his race, since he gets the news on the same day of the George Floyd protests and he wonders if it's an early face-saving move by Joe to get out ahead of a major fault line. Joe's later attempt at framing him for his assassination proves that he only ever saw Michael as a tool to yank around for his own selfish needs.
• Missing Mom: Ted's wife, Eric's mother, just left one day. We never learn why.
• More Dakka: In the climax, while fleeing the Antifa attack, Cross hides in a gun shop and comes out with a machine gun. He sprays automatic gunfire in the general vicinity of his targets and just about everywhere else as well, just to be sure.
• Mother's Little Helpers: Sheriff Joe starts developing a problem with sleeping meds that he initially bought for his wife.
• My Beloved Smother: Dawn has inserted herself in Joe and Louise's life, making sure that her daughter reads all the conspiracy theories she sees fit to share with her, and in the past went berserk on Ted Garcia accusing him of taking advantage of Louise when it's heavily implied it was actually her husband, Louise's father that got her pregnant.
• Never Suicide: Vernon's favorite thing to insinuate in his conspiracy preaching. He's introduced finishing telling his followers about someone ^note most likely Jeffrey Epstein having their death staged as a suicide, and when telling about his Repressed Memories about being hunted by pedophiles in a forest, he says one of them took pity on him and helped him escape, and "committed suicide" the next day.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The trailers make it seem like the focus of the plot is going to be on an increasingly acrimonious local election between the incumbent mayor Ted Garcia and sheriff Joe Cross. This is only about half of the movie, until Joe murders Ted and his son.
• New Old West: Despite being set in 2020, the film mirrors the structure of a classic Western, with the sheriff and the mayor fighting for control of a town that feels completely cut off from modern civilization.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Brian transforms into a parody of Kyle Rittenhouse at the film's end. Like Brian, Rittenhouse killed during the 2020 summer protests, was found by a judge to have acted in self-defense, and used this infamy to become a right-wing influencer on social media.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Mayor Garcia berates Sheriff Cross about his inability to manage his own office, mentioning the more mundane examples of a Deputy fired for Police Brutality, one dying of a fentanyl overdose ("Fentanyl exposure!"), but also a third who was fired after an "encounter with a First Amendment Auditor"
  • It is also implied that Joe and Ted have gotten into a physical altercation sometime before the events of the movie, leaving Sheriff Joe with a limp.
• No Party Given: For both Garcia and Cross. Somewhat justified in that local offices in New Mexico are officially nonpartisan, though politicians in nonpartisan offices often still openly identify with a party. Given that Garcia is supportive of COVID regulations and is said to be close with real-life Democratic New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham and even received a personal gift from her, he's likely a Democrat.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: For most of the first part of the film, Brian engages in BLM protests but it’s clear that his true interest is in impressing and picking up girlfriends, chiefly his main crush, Sarah who doesn’t pick up or reciprocate his feelings. He has no true interest and in the end he makes a hard pivot to the hard right, finding a new girlfriend and gaining acceptance from the alt right.
• No, You: While arguing through the closed door of a restaurant, Cross tries to insinuate that what happens on the streets is the mayor's responsibility. Garcia counters that it's Cross's responsibility to protect those streets and serve the people.
• Obnoxious In-Laws: Dawn, Joe's mother-in-law moved in at the beginning of the Pandemic, and now isn't leaving and instead bombards the couple with her conspiracy theories, up to making her daughter read them out loud to make sure they're not just glossing over, and berating Joe at every opportunity. After Sheriff Joe is paralyzed by a knife attack, Dawn assigns herself as Joe's caretaker and spokesperson even though her daughter is no longer in the picture.
• One Phone Call: After being arrested and thrown in the holding cell, Deputy Michael immediately demands his phone call. He uses it to contact his Uncle Jamie, desperately explaining that he's being framed for murder and begging for legal help.
• Orgy of Evidence: The "NO JUSTICE NO PEACE" graffiti on the wall at the Garcia's murder scene and the watch plus the rifle found in Michael's car.
• Outside-Context Problem: Two-thirds into the film, heavily armed terrorists suddenly arrive in Eddington via private jet. These black-clad operatives with anti-fascist patches blindside Joe completely, transforming what had been a local political drama into something far more dangerous and chaotic. Whether they're genuine extremists or part of a larger conspiracy remains deliberately ambiguous, but their arrival escalates the violence to a whole new level that nobody in town was prepared for.
• Parental Incest: It's Implied that Lou's father molested her and that he's also the one who impregnated her. No one in the family can deal with this. Dawn blames Ted, who briefly dated her. Joe takes this accusation and runs with it, although for him it's more opportunistic. Lou herself falls into Vernon Jefferson Peak's fantasy.
• Pedophilia Is a Special Kind of Evil:
  • The key tenet of Vernon's cult is the belief that there is a vast network of highly connected pedophiles, and that they each victimize dozens to hundreds of victims, and Louise, who until now had been largely apathetic towards her mother's conspiracy obsessions gets really fired up about the topic, which in turn shocks Dawn who thinks she's talking crazy. It's heavily implied, but never outright confirmed that Louise was molested by her father, Dawn's husband and late Sheriff of Eddington, and that Dawn probably knew about it and did nothing.
  • Sheriff Joe tries to invoke this trope by accusing Mayor Ted Garcia of being the one who molested Louise, but Louise herself posts a video online rebuking the allegation, and in turn begin to allege someone else, that we never hear as the video is always turned off before she's finished.
• The Perfect Crime: Sheriff Joe thinks he's committed this when he kills Mayor Garcia and his son, as he picks up his shell casings, deletes the security camera footage and leaves a political slogan painted on the wall inside the house. Unfortunately for him, he missed one of the casings, and not far from it, the Tribal police discover tire tracks, both on Pueblo tribal land. And the graffiti? Detective Butterfly makes note of the odd way the letter E is painted, which he later then notices on the whiteboard at the Sheriff's office.
• The Place: The movie is named after the small New Mexico town where the story unfolds.
• Police Are Useless: The Eddington Sheriff's department used to be larger, but has shrunk to just three people: the troubled Sheriff Cross who has a personal beef with the Mayor, Deputy Guy who is paranoid and incompetent, and Deputy Michael who is mostly a Nice Guy but somewhat aloof and more focused on his Crypto portfolio. During an argument with the mayor, we learn that one former deputy was ousted for Police Brutality, another died of a fentanyl overdose (which the Sheriff and Mayor have conflicting theories about) and others left to work for a larger department. Later, when investigating the Garcia murder scene, Cross and Guy bungle evidence to the incredulous shock of Detective Butterfly Jimenez, the Tribal police officer.
• Police Brutality:
  • Cross gets physical with a protester, and the footage is reported by CNN. Notably, the film is set during the summer of 2020, which saw increased awareness of police brutality after the death of George Floyd (who is mentioned by name several times in the film) and widespread protests (some of which made it to the tiny town of Eddington, rocking its way of life). The local activists also spread the out-of-context clip of Cross' earlier encounter with Lodge, which was in fact a fight the Sheriff lost and he didn't even get to arrest the homeless man.
  • During an argument with Mayor Ted Garcia, it's brought up that a deputy from the department was fired for brutality recently.
• Politically Incorrect Villain:
  • When Sheriff Joe is driving around in his newly campaign-ad bedecked police car, giving a speech out of the loudspeakers to empty streets, Eric Garcia bikes alongside him and makes fun of him, Joe calls the boy a faggot, and then tells Deputy Michael, who was filming him drive around to cut out the last part.
  • Deputy Guy keeps calling the protest movement "Blacks Lives Matter" ^note "Blacks" is considered an offensive way to refer to black people and thinks the protests are a Staged Populist Uprising, specifically naming Jewish financier George Soros as the culprit.
• Political Overcorrectness:
  • Mayor Ted Garcia makes a big show of enforcing Covid mandates, has his pronouns in his Zoom username (while also calling a woman opposing the data center "this bitch" off mic) and has a campaign ad featuring a much more diverse cast than the actual population of the town he's the mayor of.
  • BLM Eddington are almost entirely white, and spout jargon they struggle to understand, with specifically Brian just parroting what he's told and trying to impress Sarah.
• Posting What You Shouldn't: Sheriff Joe Cross has a habit of jumping the gun with his online posts, getting inspired by an incident at a grocery store to film a video and announce his run for mayor, without consulting his wife Louisa who doesn't want the attention a campaign would bring to their troubled household. Later, Joe digs himself even deeper, falsely accusing his opponent, the incumbent mayor Ted Garcia of having raped Louisa which then prompts his wife to pack up and leave with a cult, and later posts her own video online rebutting her husband's claim.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: Joe sinks to increasing lows in his desperation to win the mayoral election. He firmly becomes an outright villain when he murders Ted and his son out of sheer spite.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Joe accomplishes his goal of becoming mayor and goes uncaught for the murders of Ted and Eric. However, he is now completely paralyzed, with only Dawn and his caretaker as his company, and Joe also has to watch as Louise is now pregnant by Vernon.
• Red Scare: Joe's first idea for a campaign ad is a dead stick figure wearing a red face mask with a hammer and sickle on it. He and Deputy Guy also become obsessed with the idea of Antifa Terrorists invading the town.
• Repressed Memories: Vernon claims to have these of his father gifting him to be hunted in a forest by a cabal of pedophiles, and a couple that follow him supposedly were tortured and abused in the same basement as kids and unknowingly reconnected as adults. Louise is implied to have some sort of childhood trauma of sexual nature, and the implication is that she was abused by her father, the previous Sheriff of Eddington, but the truth of the matter is left as a Riddle for the Ages.
• Riddle for the Ages: The movie brings up a number of questions that affect the plot and characters, but are never clearly answered.
  • For Joe: It's heavily implied but pointedly not confirmed whether he contracts COVID. Cross grapples with the homeless man early in the film and increasingly suffers from a cough as the film progresses. The homeless man and Guy both start coughing later in the film as well. After breaking into the bar and drinking various alcoholic beverages midway through the film, the homeless man complains that it all "tastes the same." In a late scene, Cross seems to be unable to taste or smell his morning coffee. He receives an email with his COVID test results but never opens it, so the film pointedly avoids any confirmation.
  • For Louise: The identity of her molester when she was a teenager. In a video, she publicly denies that it was Ted Garcia, but never names her actual attacker. It's heavily implied that her father could have been responsible, but there's just enough room to also interpret it as rhetoric she's repeating from Vernon.
  • The past relationship between Sarah and Deputy Michael isn't really explained, as everyone seems to have a different idea of how serious they were.
  • Someone vandalized an antiques shop that displayed old-timey racist statues. The owner blames the protestors, the protestors claim it's a False Flag Operation. And while there is a group that goes around committing similar false flags that does arrive in Eddington, they do so days after the incident.
  • For Ted and Eric Garcia: What happened to the missing Mrs. Garcia? While Joe suggests foul play in her disappearance and Ted is implied to have latent misogyny that could have driven her away, it's equally possible that none of the characters have a clear answer.
  • For Joe's assailant toward the end of the movie: Is he actually an ANTIFA extremist, or part of a right-wing False Flag Operation? The fact that he flies in on a private jet and has videos of him and his group performing similar acts all over the country heavily implies the latter, but the media ends up running with the former interpretation, and ultimately nothing is made clear about his motives.
• Ridiculous Vehicle Topper: After Sheriff Cross decides to run for Mayor, he turns his police cruiser into a campaign car with ridiculously verbose and grammatically incorrect campaign signs, topped off with a large poster box on top accusing incumbent Mayor Ted Garcia of working for Bill Gates. At the lowest point after Joe's wife has left him, posting a video online refuting Joe's false accusations against Ted, Joe is called for a noise complaint at the Mayor's house, and after failing to make the party turn down the music, the despondent Joe drives away, getting the poster box on top of his car stuck on a branch and it comes crashing down as he drives off.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: The Eddington protestors frequently chant slogans about the victimization of black men and how Eddington rests on stolen land. While they aim their vitriol at the sheriff's office and their motives are often more driven by image instead of empathy, their assessment of Joe as a violent thug interested in holding onto his power over others proves to be on the money. Meanwhile, SolidGoldMagikarp does end up conquering more indigenous land alongside Eddington for the sake of its own profits.
• Sex in a Shared Room: Joe's fate at the end is that he is forced by being locked in to spend his whole life in the same bed where Dawn frequently has sex with his male nurse.
• Sexless Marriage: Louise and Joe. We are introduced to Sheriff Joe in his car, watching a Youtube video about how to convince a partner to have a child with you, but later at home in bed, Louise just turns away from him and recoils a bit when Joe tries to touch her. At the end of the film, we see Louise on stage with Vernon, smiling and pregnant.
• Shell-Shock Silence: After the explosion goes off near Joe during the climactic shootout, the sound design shifts entirely to his perspective. All ambient noise becomes muffled and distant, replaced by high-pitched tinnitus ringing. We experience his disorientation firsthand as he struggles to process the chaos erupting around him, unable to hear the gunfire or other helpful noises.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: The film takes a much darker turn after Joe shoots Lodge at the bar and disposes his body down a river.
• Short-Distance Phone Call: Ted calls Joe from just outside the sheriff's office, instructing him to come out for a private conversation instead of simply stepping inside. The unnecessary phone call highlights Ted's controlling nature and the unease between them, even before the conversation turns serious.
• Shrine to the Fallen: Joe and Dawn both maintain a shrine to Louise's deceased father, the previous sheriff of Eddington who died seven years ago when his heart suddenly stopped. The shrine becomes a focal point of tension as Dawn venerates her late husband while Louise's trauma-driven art, and her constantly-interrupted denial of Joe's charges against Ted, suggests a much darker truth about what happened in that household.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: The film leans heavily toward the cynical end of the scale, exemplified by the fate of Native American Tribal Police Officer Butterfly Jimenez. He's established as being on the path to expose Joe's murders of Ted and Eric Garcia through competent detective work. Instead, during the climax, Butterfly has his leg shot off by Joe and is then killed by a sniper moments later, eliminating any chance of the truth coming to light.
• Soapbox Sadie: Sarah, who is shown to read James Baldwin and Angela Davis, becomes a vocal member of the local Black Lives Matter protests. She forgets her handbag festooned with activist pins at the Garcia house when she was visiting Eric which causes Deputy Guy to suspect her of being involved with the murder of Ted and Eric.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: "Firework" by Katy Perry plays during a party at Ted's house, whereby Cross is stared at and ostracized by all the partygoers, and Ted delivers a Bitch Slap to him.
• The Stoner: Eric and Brian are introduced smoking a joint on the street, hiding it from Sheriff Cross but only barely, and Eric is frequently shown smoking.
• Symbolic Glass House: Mayor Ted Garcia and his son Eric live in a Big Fancy House with lots of glass doors in the middle of nowhere where Joe believes Ted may have killed his wife. It gets highlighted when Ted is shot and Killed Mid-Sentence by Joe through the glass door, and then Eric is shot and falls through another glass door, dead.
• Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist: Native American Tribal Police Officer Butterfly Jimenez is established early on as a far more competent investigator than Joe or his deputies. After the Garcia murders, Butterfly methodically works to uncover the truth, noticing crucial details Joe's department bungled or overlooked—like the distinctive way Joe writes the letter "E" matching the graffiti at the crime scene. Unlike Joe's corrupt, paranoid department, Butterfly represents actual professional police work, making him both sympathetic to the audience and an antagonist to Joe's increasingly desperate cover-up.
• Tech Bro: Mayor Garcia takes pride in trying to create a pro-tech Eddington, while Deputy Michael is an obsessive crypto currency investor, even listening to a crypto podcast while shooting target practice. Notably at the end of the film when the latter is at target practice, he's not listening to these anymore.
• The Thing That Would Not Leave: Louise's mother Dawn moved in with her daughter and her son-on-law some time before May 2020 but the stay was initially only supposed to be until March. Now, she bombards her housemates with conspiracy theories and complaints about her son-in-law not being good enough.
• Tranquil Fury: During Vernon's visit at the Cross home, Louise opens up for the first time, decrying the evils of pedophilia in a calm but venom-dripping voice that scares her mother.
• Villain Eats Your Lunch: Vernon Jefferson Peak, the weirdo cult leader, keeps sticking his toe over the line of imposing on Cross's hospitality. First he sits at the table without being invited and laughs genially when Cross pointedly invites the whole group to sit. He then asks permission to step inside but doesn't even finish the question before going in. Then he starts sipping from a glass of water that wasn't offered. Before leaving, he invites himself back into Cross's house on the pretext of washing the glass he used.
• Visual Title Drop: Early on, the camera lingers on the "Eddington" city limits sign as Joe's headlights illuminate it in the darkness.
• Voice for the Voiceless: Dawn becomes this for Joe in the epilogue. Getting stabbed in the head renders him a paralyzed vegetable and Dawn uses this to speak on his behalf, spreading conspiracy theories with little to no consequences.
• Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma: Cross adorns his truck with self-made campaign decals, including one reading, "Your Being Manipulated."
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The disappearance of Ted's wife is implied to be a case of Never a Runaway throughout the entire first hour, but the story is abandoned once Ted and Eric are murdered.

"We need to free each other's hearts."