Coming off its premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, A24 has unveiled the first full trailer for director Ari Aster’s contemporary Western “Eddington.”
Set in 2020 in the very midst of the COVID-19 lockdown, the film follows a New Mexico sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) whose frustrations with the state of the world and the country’s restrictive pandemic mandates lead him to run for election against his small town’s mayor (Pedro Pascal). The conflict between the two men just further escalates existing tensions throughout the town and threatens to destroy the already tenuous bonds between its neighbors.
The new “Eddington” trailer, which climaxes with Phoenix’s Joe Cross unloading an entire machine gun’s worth of bullets onto his town’s deathly quiet streets, teases just some of the chaos and violence that moviegoers can expect to see when the film hits theaters this summer. You can watch the trailer yourself below.
In addition to Phoenix and Pascal, “Eddington” also features “The Penguin” star Deirdre O’Connell, Emma Stone and Austin Butler. Stone stars in the film as Louise, the wife of Phoenix’s Joe, while Butler portrays Vernon, a popular right-wing YouTuber. Together, the actors make up easily the most star-studded cast of Aster’s career to date.
Like Aster’s last film, 2023’s “Beau is Afraid,” “Eddington” looks primed to be one of the year’s most divisive films. It divided the critics who caught it at Cannes in May, and it currently holds a 65% Tomatometer score based on 49 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. In TheWrap’s review, critic Ben Croll called the film “a social satire as blunt and broad as America itself.”
In the new “Eddington” trailer, Phoenix’s Joe urges everyone to free their hearts and question the cost of going to war with their neighbors, while also adding further fuel to several dangerous social fires. At Cannes, Aster revealed that he wrote “Eddington” when he found himself caught in a “state of fear and anxiety about the world,” and there is certainly a lot of fear and a lot of anxiety present in the footage that has so far been released from his latest film.
“Eddington” is set to hit theaters on Friday, July 18.
