Wow. A lot to process and unpack. _Eddington_ received rapturous applause and huge moments of laughter at Sydney Film Festival. It’s chaotic, freewheeling and incredibly funny. Yes - it is Aster’s best film. Aster has made an unhinged social satire on the culture wars - the division, virtue signalling and general disingenuousness. And he does so with sub-machine gun precision, much like the one that appears in the final act. Aster’s is a scattershot approach, rife with motif and self-aware savagery. No one is safe - right-wingers get both barrels, but the resulting shrapnel hits a lot of attention-seeking privileged white kids. Ideologies fester in the microcosm of the small titular New Mexican town, the fever and sweats mirrored by the Covid that slowly takes hold of our main character. Someone once said “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” and certainly proves true in this bleak comedy. We’re not completely through the chaos satirised in Aster’s fourth feature. Not by a very long shot. But this neo-Western, with assured insanity, turns a mirror to our modern war of shouting-over-listening, and poses the question, “Guys, what the fuck are we doing?”

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