Fantastic. Ari Aster has grown from a very good genre director into a very good director, period. His understanding and manipulation of light is excellent.
I find his writing completely surprises me. He completely skewers modern conservatism and neo-liberal political outrage, with a no-holds-barred sort of aggression that felt like an assault. Unlike somebody like Sidney Lumet, Aster is not interested in finding the humanity in his subjects. He wants you to be horrified by them, and find yourself in them. This served him well as a horror director and serves him well here, in a film that feels equally inspired by the Coens and the Safdies.
I had the film predictably plotted out in my mind, but the midway twist came and blew away (no pun intended) all my expectations. I genuinely didn’t know what to expect after that. The second half of the film is a gorgeous, visceral panic attack that had me so stressed out that it took much longer than usual to fall asleep. I have continued to feel the same low-grade anxiety all day.
The highest compliments I think one could give a film are that its story surprises you and its mood stays with you. Both of these things are true for me with Eddington. They are so strongly true that as much as I loved it, and I truly did, I feel no need to ever see it again.