Law and Order

Ari Aster, who gave the horror film a new jolt of macabre energy in Hereditary (2017) and Midsommar (2019), both concerned in part with the nightmare – or jet-black comedy – of being a daughter, has recently taken a turn towards psychological melodrama, with male folly and fear of impotence as its central theme. Like the divisive Beau Is Afraid (2023), which resembled a three-hour panic attack, Eddington stars Joaquin Phoenix looking less than his best and portrays a sort of heightened mid-life crisis. The shift seems merely contingent, a product of industry mechanics. Aster, who was born in 1986, has explained that he had originally intended Beau Is Afraid to be his debut, a statement as eccentric and disturbing as anything in the film itself. Eddington reworks and – crucially – updates another script, a neo-Western, which was languishing in his drawer when Hereditary, the story of a family curse replete with jump-scares, opened at Sundance and turned him almost overnight into the most extensively discussed and closely followed American filmmaker of his generation.