Cannes 2025: Out of Breath

As I write these words, it’s day six of Cannes and I, like many other overstuffed and underslept critics, am feeling like the vagabond in the opening shot of Ari Aster’s Eddington: unkempt and muttering nonsense under my breath between coughs and cackles as I shuffle toward the Palais. This unhoused man, who’s on his way to the fictional New Mexican town where the film is set, is just a minor character in the Hereditary director’s latest, but his mad ravings set the tone for a movie about the collective psychosis that took hold of American political life in 2020, when the pandemic forced the world into lockdown and social distancing. With the self-congratulatory and smug Eddington, Aster conjures this still-evolving cultural zeitgeist in the shape of a satirical thriller centered on a bumbling sheriff named Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix)—a man inching toward a breakdown caused by mostly petty obstacles and exacerbated by his own incompetence.